24.1: Introduction

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Learning Objectives

Collect direct and indirect feedback from peers and students about online teaching effectiveness before, during, and after the course.
Use this feedback to make changes to your online course or course environment, both during the course and for future iterations.

Teaching effectiveness describes instructors’ ability to affect student success. It is usually defined according to several factors, such as how well instructors organize courses, how well they know the course material, how clearly they communicate with students, how frequently they provide timely feedback, and other criteria. In the classroom, effectiveness sometimes depends on the instructor’s enthusiasm or disposition. During fully online and blended learning courses, students often need more structure and support to succeed because their course activities usually require them to take greater responsibility for their own learning success. Therefore, many of the criteria take on even more importance when evaluating online teaching effectiveness.

Online teaching is often held to higher standards than classroom teaching, and sometimes these standards have nothing to do with the teacher’s ability. For example, a technological breakdown can have a negative impact on students’ evaluation of an instructor’s work, though the instructor is rarely responsible for the technical failure.

To succeed, you should find some allies to help. If you are new to online teaching and learning, let your students know. They will usually give you a lot of leeway. Some of the students may offer to help you set up or facilitate technology-based activities or at least respond positively to your requests for technological help. Overall, you will find it well worth the effort to evaluate and improve your online teaching effectiveness.

There are many ways to evaluate teaching effectiveness in either the physical or virtual environments. Getting pointers and advice before the term begins can save you from making revisions later. Formative feedback, collected during an ongoing course, improves that specific course. Summative feedback, collected after a course ends, improves the next iterations. Feedback that applies to the instructor’s process can also improve other courses.

In this chapter, I discuss seeking feedback from peer instructors, distance education practitioners, students, and even yourself. If you teach fully online, you should be able to convert any face-to-face feedback strategy to the online environment, even if I do not specifically point out how to do it.