Impact of Course Modality on Student Course Evaluations

Instructors at universities around the world have been forced to rapidly adapt to the changing educational landscape that the COVID-19 pandemic created.Most universities switched to exclusively online instruction in the middle of March, 2020, and finished the 2020-2021 academic year without returning to face-to-face instruction.The fall semester of 2020 brought an increased diversity of instructional modalities.Some universities remained exclusively online, while others returned to face-to-face instruction, albeit heavily modified.Some universities utilized different modalities for different courses, and allowed the course instructors to choose which mode of instruction best fits their own needs, the needs of their students, and the objectives of the course.This latter approach was the path taken by Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.Instructors were allowed to choose the modality of their courses, and they chose between modified face-to-face, hybrid, online-synchronous, and onlineasynchronous formats.In nearly all cases, the modality of the course was significantly different from the way the course had been taught prior to the pandemic.The purpose of this study is to examine how students in the university's Department of Technology rated the effectiveness of courses using each of these different course modalities via their end-of-semester course evaluations.The university has used the IDEA third-party student course evaluation service for many years, and this study uses the student feedback data already collected.This study consists of two parts: first, a longitudinal study examines how the student ratings changed for courses using each instructional modality for the Fall 2020 semester by using the student evaluations in the Fall 2019 semester as a baseline.Second, the Fall 2020 student evaluation scores for each course modality are compared directly against one another to determine which course modalities the students rate highest.The results show that while face-to-face courses in Fall 2020 had improved student evaluations compared to the same courses in Fall 2019, the online-synchronous and online-asynchronous courses had lower student evaluations in some categories for the Fall 2020 semester than in Fall 2019.