Creating a Peer Assessment for Online Teaching: Four Salient Issues and Options

Assessing faculty who design and teach online courses is a complex and often confusing process for department chairs and deans. Yet with the growing number of courses taught online, it is a timely topic. We argue, along with others in the field (Taylor, 2014; Shattuck, Zimmerman, & Adair, 2014), that one way to augment the online teaching assessment process is to integrate peer assessment in a thoughtful and systematic manner. However, as simple as peer assessment sounds, it is a challenging task to implement with faculty. In this article we share a yearlong process that our faculty engaged in while creating a department-level peer assessment model. In addition we outline the salient issues that emerged during this process, along with options for addressing these issues.