Demystifying best practices for online teaching in higher education

Online learning in higher education continues to expand exponentially. Despite existing for over twenty years, little research exists pinpointing the reasons behind online teaching successes and failure. The purpose of the current study is to identify the relationship between teaching efficacy in face-to-face and online classes by measuring teaching outcomes for instructors who taught the same class both face-to-face and online.;Course evaluation data was used to measure if teachers are equally effective across teaching modalities. Instructors (n = 24) who taught the same course both online and face-to-face were included in the sample at a small, private university in the southern United States. Overall, results could not conclusively decide if teachers were comparable across both online and face-to-face classes. Further research is necessary to make conclusions about the teacher variables which impact instructors in online versus face-to-face classes.