Instructor’s Self-Assessment of Content Design in Online Courses

Abstract

There are only a handful of studies focused on assessing online teaching. Yet, the uniqueness of online course environment provides instructors more opportunities to conduct self-assessment of their own teaching than the traditional face-to-face classroom. In this paper, we demonstrate two types of self-assessment through two cases that online course instructors can use to evaluate the course content during their regular online instructional procedures. An end-of-semester oral examination was used in Case One whereas the weekly discussion posts were used in Case Two. The instructors performed selfassessment, based on which they redesigned the course contents and activities. Nonparametric analyses were used to examine students’ learning outcomes. Results indicate that, in both cases, student learning improved with the redesigned contents and activities.