Comparing face to face and online teaching evaluations

Comparing face to face with online teaching is often the first thing people think of when they want to know if online teaching and learning is any good (as if there was some uniformity across courses and the medium was somehow more important than the instructor). My feeling is that they are two different things and it's tough to make valid comparisons, but it's still useful to try, in some cases. In the current issue of The Internet and Higher Education, Kelly, Ponton and Rovai write about their effort to understand how student evaluations of teaching differ between face to face and online courses. Their conclusion is that:

Face-to-face students tended to consider the instructor more important than online students, and they wanted their instructor to be of good character and be knowledgeable in the content; however, for online students, the course was more important than the instructor where the course organization and instructional materials were especially important. Therefore, online course design should provide a clear guide through the learning activities (Laurillard et al., 2000; Palloff & Pratt, 2001; Priest, 2000). Also, instructors should carefully select the instructional materials because the online instructor is generally no longer considered the repository of information (Sherry & Wilson, 1997). Students still need the instructor, but significant learning will occur through learner–content interaction and learner–learner interaction.

Teaching online really does expose the instructional design of a course more than face to face teaching because it's so important and so much more obvious. There's no fallback where everyone shows up for the same 3 hours a week and the instructor lectures. This is also why teaching online can influence how people teach face to face, and why someone who is inflexible in terms of instruction will likely have a hard time teaching online.