Development of a New Student Evaluation Instrument of Instructor Effectiveness in Online Courses

Abstract

The instrument was designed to measure students' levels of satisfaction with their instruction, and also gathered information concerning the students' sex, the expected vii grade in the course, and the students' perceptions of the amount of work required by the course. A cluster sample consisting of an array of online courses across the disciplines yielded a total 297 students who responded to the online survey. The students for each course selected were asked to rate their instructors with the newly developed instrument.Question 1 was answered using exploratory factor analysis, and yielded a factor structure similar to the Seven Principles.Question 2 was answered by separately factor-analyzing the responses of male and female students and comparing the factor structures. The resulting factor structures for men and women were different. However, 14 items could be realigned under five factors that paralleled some of the Seven Principles. When the scores of only those 14 items were entered in two principal components factor analyses using only men and only women, respectively and restricting the factor structure to five factors, the factor structures were the same for men and women.