I think they just logged on and fell asleep: Challenges to facilitating creativity online in higher engineering education

Abstract

Creativity is a crucial skill for future engineers. Hence, it is becoming increasingly important for higher education (HE) engineering educators to foster and enhance engineering students' creative abilities. Simultaneously, online learning has found a place in engineering education. Nevertheless, we find that HE engineering educators in all domains continue to express a sense of inadequacy when it comes to fostering creativity in hybrid and online learning environments. This sentiment persists despite the existence of scholarly work that suggests strategies for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we assume that the rationale behind this is that the proposed pedagogical approaches are primarily established through conceptual reflections, whereas the perspective of the HE engineering educators on the perceived barriers has thus far been largely neglected. Therefore, we present a study that uses data from experience interviews and focus group techniques involving 71 HE engineering educators from Ireland, Germany, Denmark and Turkey to identify the common challenges that HE engineering educators perceive when facilitating creativity in online and hybrid classroom environments. These are used to extend theory by developing a four-field conceptual model organizing the eight overarching challenges encountered. This model can be used as a basis for defining measures to support HE engineering educators in facilitating creativity online and serves as a guide for future research studies.