Come to this hands-on, interactive session and learn a comprehensive model for observing, evaluating, and assessing teaching that takes place across multiple technology-supported environments. We’ll cover:

1: Planning to evaluate technology-mediated teaching

2: Incorporating technology across teaching feedback methods

3: Data gathering and implementation

4: Customizing your evaluation strategies

Workshop Overview

Our “Evaluating Teaching in the Digital Era” session, based on the forthcoming book of the same name, shares what has changed in technology-supported and -mediated teaching in the past 10 years and offers ways to observe and assess online and technology-mediated teaching that are consistent, equitable, and fair. Our session will follow a four-part structure:

Part One: Planning to Evaluate Technology-Mediated Teaching

1 Beyond Asynchrony—Evaluating Hybrid, Live, and Technology-Mediated Teaching

2 Challenges in Evaluation of Technology-Mediated Teaching

3 Context for Evaluating Technology-Mediated Teaching

4 Foundations for Evaluating Technology-Mediated Teaching

Part Two: Incorporating Technology across Teaching Feedback Methods

5 Conducting Formative Reviews to Enhance Technology-Mediated Teaching

6 Expanding and Aligning Existing and New Observation Processes

7 Technology Mediation in Student Ratings of Teaching

8 Administrative Observation of Technology-Mediated Teaching

Part Three: Data Gathering and Implementation

9 Integrating Data Analytics in the Evaluation of Technology-Mediated Teaching

10 From Tools to Processes: Creating Holistic Evaluation Plans

11 Implementing the Evaluation Process

Part Four: Customizing Your Evaluation Strategies

12 The Technology-Mediated Teaching Evaluation Life Cycle

13 The Next Era of Teaching Evaluation

14 Principles to Practice in Six Steps

As you work on real-world cases, you’ll learn practical strategies for planning, designing, implementing, and assessing teaching-evaluation programs that account for the comprehensive nature of instruction, new challenges like artificial intelligence (AI) use, modality shifts, and blurred boundaries between materials and instructional behaviors.

Relevance to the OLC Community

Evaluating teaching in higher education has always been crucial—instructors are most often hired based on their subject matter expertise rather than their instructional skills. Despite the existence of various tools and strategies to guide the evaluation of teaching, the shift to online and technology-mediated learning during the post-COVID era has highlighted inadequacies in established evaluation methods. As OLC itself now defines them, the lines among online, hybrid, and face-to-face teaching have blurred. Teaching is a fluid, dynamic process that cannot be evaluated strictly within the confines of its delivery mode. We now face the need for a comprehensive approach with which to evaluate teaching—one that acknowledges the integrated nature of technology-mediated and in-person instruction, while adapting to the evolving pedagogical landscape to ensure the continual enhancement of teaching quality and, consequently, student learning outcomes.

We now find ourselves in an instructional world where the bounded environment of the LMS seems almost simple. Especially as a result of the emergency remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, the possible permutations and definitions of “online teaching” have exploded.

For those of us tasked with observing, evaluating, crediting, and critiquing the teaching that happens at our institutions, we can no longer assume that looking in one “place”—whether that is a classroom, an LMS shell, or a Zoom recording of a live remote session—will afford us a representative sample of the teaching practices and behaviors that instructors exhibit.

Engagement & Interaction Plan

In this world-café-style session, we will introduce and expand on a new model for planning, designing, implementing, and assessing teaching-evaluation programs and practices. You will collaboratively and individually create and practice with engagement plans, program content, and observation activity protocols that you can use immediately at their home institutions. Whether you are familiar with teaching observation or are new to the concept, you’ll discover specific actions you can take to strengthen your teaching-evaluation program.

You will also use our new model by using artificial intelligence (AI) tools effectively at all stages of the development and implementation arc. As a cap to our conversation, we’ll also note several places in the process where we as professionals can use AI tools ourselves to create effective evaluation practices. Our workshop will follow the world-café model for inclusive engagements:

1. Setting: our session will open with a thought experiment about your existing teaching observation practices. This will set up our later conversations.
2. Welcome: we will establish many different ways that you can “be” in our session, to provide a brave space of collective and collaborative effort.
3. Wicked challenges: as we examine the teaching-evaluation space, we will collectively define some thorny problems that many of us face in our design for, teaching of, and support of our learners—and how those traces do or don’t get observed.
4. Questions & small-group rounds: we will make time to brainstorm four big questions around planning, designing, implementing, and assessing teaching-evaluation programs and practices.
5. Harvest: as we wrap up our session, we will create a shared record of our ideas, questions, action plans, and take-aways from our time together.

This session will also follow the tenets of the universal design for learning (UDL) framework by providing multiple ways to keep participants engaged (solo, collaborative, and interactive), multiple ways to take in and produce information (slide visuals, video sharing, shared-document notes, spoken audio), and multiple ways to join the conversation and show skills (text chat, shared-document notes, self-guided reflection). We will use active-learning techniques and provide use-them-now resources for participants.

Key Takeaways

By attending our session, you will take away key knowledge, practices, skills, and materials to support your teaching-evaluation program at your home institution.

• Knowledge: you will understand a four-part model for planning, designing, implementing, and assessing teaching-evaluation programs.
• Practices: you will conduct formative and summative teaching observations in mixed-modality settings.
• Skills: you will gather data about teaching observations and use analytics to interpret your findings.
• Materials: you will work with materials that we have created (e.g., rubrics, work flows) and create your own materials to support your teaching-evaluation program at your home institution.

Thomas J. Tobin

Sole Proprietor at Independent Consultant

Thomas J. Tobin is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and speaker on technology-mediated education—especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practices, academic integrity, accessibility, and universal design for learning.

He holds an English literature master’s and Ph.D., an information science master’s, and certifications in project management (PMP), online teaching (MOT), Quality Matters (QM), accessibility (CPACC), and academic leadership (Penn State). He helped found the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring.

On Ed Tech Magazine’s Influencers “Dean’s List,” honored with the Wagner Leadership Award in Distance Learning Administration, and one of Eduflow’s global Top 100 Learning Influencers, Tom serves on the boards of Advances in Online Education, InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, and the Oklahoma University Press Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series.

His books include

• Evaluating Online Teaching (2015).
• The Copyright Ninja (2017).
• Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: UDL in Higher Education (2018).
• Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (2020).
• Implementing UDL in Irish Further Education and Training (2021).
• UDL at Scale: Whole-Campus Universal Design for Learning (2026).
• Evaluating Teaching in the Digital Era (forthcoming 2027).
• Peer Observation Made Practical (forthcoming 2028).

Find him on various social media and at thomasjtobin.com.

Jean Mandernach

Exec. Dir., Center for Innovation & Research on Teaching at Grand Canyon University