Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

24 – Evaluating and Improving Your Online Teaching Effectiveness
Writing personal teaching goals is one more practice
you can try as you prepare the online environment and
the materials and activities to go in it. Creating an online
teaching journal allows you to track your thoughts and
actions over time. Including personal teaching goals among
the first entries will get you off to a good beginning.
Identifying student
expectations and abilities
Involve students in the teaching and learning process
from the start. Students who take part in this process
often become more engaged in the course itself. Let
them know what you will be doing and how you will be
doing it throughout the term. Tell them if you are new
to online teaching. At the beginning of each term, I ask
students to tell me what they expect from the course,
beyond the learning objectives in the syllabus. I will revisit
these student expectations later, when I get to creating
and using mid-semester evaluation surveys.
If you want to include students in the entire evaluation
process, ask them to help create an effectiveness
rubric before the course begins. First, tell them the criteria
for which you specifically want their feedback. Then
ask them how they define online teaching effectiveness.
Not only do they have to generate the criteria, they also
have to agree on the range that defines how well you
meet the criteria. Make sure to provide examples so they
can see what typical ranges look like. Let them know up
front how many student-defined criteria will go into the
rubric. If that number is five, for example, then they can
generate as many ideas as they want before voting on the
top five. This exercise can be done in small groups or as
a whole class, either face-to-face or online.
To prepare for collecting indirect feedback throughout
the course, create a benchmark by asking students to
perform certain activities at the beginning. For example,
ask students to take a small quiz, define common vocabulary,
or other minor tasks. In the first week of the
course, this activity is not worth any points, though you
can assign points to motivate students to complete the
activity. Later in the term, you can ask the students to
perform the same activity to see how well they are
meeting the course objectives or how well they are
learning certain material.
Finally, you can improve teaching effectiveness by
increasing students’ responsibility for their own learning.
Ask students to take a learning preferences survey,
such as the Index of Learning Styles created by Richard
Felder and Barbara Soloman (find the survey itself and
descriptions of learning styles at http://www.ncsu.edu
/felder-public/ILSpage.html). Then direct them to turn
in the results to you. This will give you ideas about providing
multiple pathways for students to learn the same
knowledge, skills or attitudes. By considering the student-centred
approach, you will improve your teaching
effectiveness in the online environment.
Getting different reactions
throughout the course
You can conduct formative feedback for a number of
reasons: to check how things are going at a certain point;
to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific assignment or
resource; or to gauge student attitudes. The frequency
with which instructors obtain feedback can range from
once per session to once in the middle of the term. Direct
methods to collect formative feedback include, but
are not limited to, the following:
PEER REVIEW AND SELF-EVALUATION
As important as student engagement can be, student
evaluations by themselves are not sufficient. Solicit peer
review of specific resources, activities, or assessment
strategies, your course structure, your communication
strategies, or anything else about which you might have
concerns. If you cannot find anyone in your school,
department or college who is also teaching online you
can ask school or district administrators, academic
technology staff members, or faculty development centre
staff members to identify prospective peer mentors
for this type of feedback. In some cases, the staff members
themselves may be able to help you as well.
Another strategy is to create benchmarks for yourself
and take time each week to see how you are doing. For
example, if you set a goal to answer a certain number of
discussion threads in a particular forum, keep track of
how many replies you submit, and make adjustments. If
you want to return all students’ written assignments in a
certain amount of time, note how many you were able to
complete within your self-imposed deadline. This will
help you create more realistic expectations for yourself
for future assignments.
ONLINE SUGGESTION BOX
Online suggestion boxes are unstructured activities that
capture voluntary comments at irregular intervals
throughout an entire term. You can use email or a
threaded discussion forum for this activity. If you use a
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