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

24 – Evaluating and Improving Your Online Teaching Effectiveness
how I can change to meet their needs, then I ask them to
give me suggestions. In one case, the students stated that
I sometimes used terms from the field that were not
used or defined in the readings. The short-term solution
was to create a short vocabulary list for each unit, based
on both experiences and readings. I chose to do this
myself, but I could have involved the students even further
by having the class generate vocabulary lists for
each unit, based on words that each student had to look
up individually.
Students may ask you to do a number of things related
to the course or how it is set up:
• To clarify your expectations, update your course objectives,
create more detailed instructions for assignments,
or identify how students will be evaluated for
each learning objective more clearly.
• To improve the online course structure or organization,
consolidate all resources, activities, and assessment
strategies related to each learning objective.
• To show more knowledge of the course material,
create and upload recorded lectures, upload your
presentations, and provide information about any research
that you have done related to the course content.
• To increase the variety of avenues for students to
reach learning objectives, provide resources in different
formats (e.g., video clips, text readings, charts and
graphs) and encourage students to demonstrate
knowledge or skills in different ways, if possible (also
see Chapter 11, Accessibility and Universal Design).
• To provide more opportunities for active learning,
create small group discussions around materials or
assignments, use collaborative tools such as wikis (see
Chapter 25, Tools for Engagement and Collaboration),
and assign students to online study groups.
• To show the relevance of coursework to the world,
assign students to relate course content to current
news, provide examples of current research in the
field (e.g., published articles) as optional readings,
and invite experts in the field to participate in online
activities such as discussion forums.
Question text Answer’s text partial
credit
There are many ways to evaluate online
teaching effectiveness throughout the
course.
Figure 24.5 Moodle LMS item analysis
R. Counts R.% % Correct
Facility
SD
Disc.
Index
Disc.
Coeff.
True (1.00) 28/32 88% 88% 0.35 0.83 0.57
False (0.00) 4/32 13%
Question 4 Multiple Answer
Average Score X points
Which of the following are formative feedback techniques for evaluating online teaching effectiveness?
Correct Answers Percent Correct Percent Incorrect
X Online teaching effectiveness rubric 94.117645% 5.882353%
X Mid-semester evaluation survey 88.2353% 11.764706%
Ouija board 94.117645% 5.882353%
X Focus group 70.588234% 29.411766%
One-hour threads 50% 50%
Figure 24.6 Blackboard LMS item statistics
Education for a Digital World 373