Online teaching competencies in observational rubrics: what are institutions evaluating?

Evaluation of online instructors is a developing field of research. Institutions have made great progress in recent years to refine their efforts to evaluate online teaching in order to improve online teaching. Some institutions, however, still struggle to evaluate online instructors who did not design the course they are teaching. The purpose of this study was to identify some of the most important observable teaching behaviors identified in evaluation rubrics and how these compare to established online teaching competencies. Findings indicate that there is a growing consensus of what are the most important, observable teaching behaviors, and that this can help improve existing models of online teaching competencies.