As online learning has become a mainstream practice across the globe, school administration and faculty members are confronting the challenge of evaluating the quality of online teaching and importantly, teaching techniques. With equipment, tools, and curriculum always designed for the face-to-face classroom, forcibly ill-fitting it into an online learning environment have made instructors and reviewers more confused than ever.
Let’s dig into detail the perspective of school leaders and administrators about the evaluation of teaching.
What is the purpose of evaluating teachers in online teaching?
During this mandatory online teaching, the purpose is to improve the teaching methods, keep students interested, and support teachers and students both with needed tools, technology, and revised resources.
What are the evaluation criteria put forwarded by school leaders?
- Does the instructor’s expertise get appropriately demonstrated in the online class?
- Does the planned lesson include every essential element needed to match the student’s level of understanding?
- Does the teacher treat all the students fairly and equally in the class?
- Are all the student’s questions get answered in the chat box?
- Does the instructor incorporate new teaching technique in the class?
What are the evaluation criteria put forwarded by school leaders?
- How much insight a sixty-minute class will give to evaluate?
- If there occurs a technical glitch in LMS, who would be at fault – teacher or student?
- If students are slow on the keyboard but have sound knowledge about the topic, how their level of knowledge would be evaluated?
- Is there a way to check student’s attentiveness in the classroom?
Joining a forty-minutes class, checking the quiz’s result, having a glance at students’ ratings certainly provides insight but does not give a clear parameter to evaluate a teacher. To evaluate the quality of teaching, we need to consider a holistic picture of online teaching, which includes peer review, technology support, platform, and devices.
A Framework document to reopen schools during COVID-19
Checklist for Online Learning
The first and foremost requirement is to check the availability of online class devices like laptop, monitor, and tablet with good connection with teachers and students. The use of education platform like Kneura is another pre-requisite.
Active participation in the online class is the major parameter. For students, their attendance, level of interest, participation in quiz and tests, assignments, and marks obtained are the parameters. For teachers, enthusiasm to explain topic, crafting lessons with multimedia rich lessons, personalized content recommendation, adequate guidance, and meeting their concerns get counted.
A Holistic Plan to Evaluate Teachers in Online Classes
Point of view can be substituted with data and insights and rather than relying on opinion pieces, educational institutions are opting for a machine intelligence platform that gathers the data, predicts the patterns, and gives the most accurate and unbiased results. Before declaring the quality of teaching, what all involve in teaching.
a. Lesson Plan
Rate the level of preparation that includes availability of images, videos, and texts in the lessons prepared the by teachers. A multimedia-rich lesson has more impact than just sharing the notebook screenshot.
b. Assessment
The frequent assessments and quick grading help students knowing their strengths and weak areas and offers an opportunity to patch up them all.
c. Online Teaching
With the change in the instructional model where physical connection is limited or nil, additional effort is required to make the classes interesting and engaging.
d. Student Performance
The student’s performance has a lot to do with the teaching quality. AI and Machine Learning technology tracks the knowledge gain, attentiveness, interest, IQ level, content recommendation, and personal information of the students.
At the heart of the quality of online teaching is a clear set of instruction models, which acts as a baseline expectation for teachers. With student’s rating, administrator’s review, and advancement in digital education platform, evaluating the quality of teaching has become easier than ever. Set the rubric, deploy a standard checklist, track log-in and log-off time, count numbers of added resources, check asynchronous and synchronous posts, get the feedback and evaluate the teaching skill.
In institutions with centralized AI-based cloud connected classroom platform like Kneura, data and analytics are available in a few clicks.
- Admin can manage staff and allocate pre-prepared resources to them.
- Any lesson or resource shared by the teachers is accessible by the administrator.
- Submitted assignments and scored marks in the tests or quiz can be tracked for every student.
- Admin can be a part of any class and check the competency of teachers, have an eye on how comfortably teachers are using the given tools or devices.
Needless to say, online teaching is a different endeavour than face-to-face teaching, however, as a school leader selecting the right data driven education platform like kneura will provide adequate qualitative and quantitative data to measure the efficiency and take corrective action.