Higher education engineering educator's perspectives on challenges and upskilling needs in teaching creativity online

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, engineering education is shifting to online learning. However, we find that current online engineering curricula at universities fall short when it comes to teaching and rewarding creativity. To aggravate the situation, there is a paucity of pedagogical studies addressing teaching creativity online in HE institutions and there is a lack of systematic approaches to guide engineering educators to incorporate the topic into online teaching environments. To address these shortcomings, we conducted a comprehensive qualitative study using structured interviews and focus group techniques involving more than 60 higher HE engineering educators from Ireland, Germany, Denmark and Turkey to investigate the challenges related to teaching creativity online. Eight challenges were identified and we organize them in a four-field-matrixconceptual model which encompasses intellectual, social, organizational, and technological challenge aspects.