Participants

This study used secondary data on online teaching evaluation obtained from a university in Ghana. The evaluation data comprised teaching appraisal ratings provided by students enrolled on various programs within the university. All cases and data points were included in this study. Thus, the sample size was 24,726 regular students, corresponding to 152,658 expected responses (based on the number of courses taken) from 1,673 courses. It should be noted that students took different courses and consequently, rated lecturers teaching the different courses. Of the 152,658 expected responses, only 73,906 were received from the students. That is, not all the students responded to the online evaluation form. The available cases were included in the study using a census approach. Although the data obtained had over 20 items, only 10 items were extracted for this study because they focused on soliciting information regarding the quality of teaching and teaching strategy. Students responded to the evaluation form in a manner that required answers for each section; otherwise, they could not open the subsequent sections to answer. This suggests that there were no item non-responses in the dataset.

The data obtained for this research were screened and cleaned based on four criteria: (1) courses that had only one student response were deleted from the final data set because there would be no variance; (2) core courses were deleted from the analysis. The reason is that although several instructors taught the general/core course, the ratings were merged to appear as if only one instructor handled the course; (3) duplicated courses were deleted because this could confound the findings of the study; and (4) specific courses that had inconsistencies in terms of the responses/data were deleted. After the implementation of these criteria, 2,553 students (within 145 courses) remained in the dataset for final analysis through purposive sampling.