I'm on the EdTech committee at my school and we had something interesting happen about the question of syncronous vs asyncronous (that is, live classes vs recor

I'm on the EdTech committee at my school and we had something interesting happen about the question of syncronous vs asyncronous (that is, live classes vs recordings). At the end of the semester we gave a version of the usual student eval. Half of the faculty on the committee had taught sync and reported that their student evals thanked them for doing that and said it was much better. The other half of the faculty did async and said their students thanked them for doing what they did. I did async and my students were clear that it was better for them, that they had other classes where they had to lose time at work to attend, etc., and async was so much better. We saw the same effect in the feedback we got from a survey of all faculty, so it is not just the people on the committee. I perceive that it is like on class evals where there is a tendency to get pretty much the same scores on each item, even on an item such as "Returns quizzes promptly" where you can measure whether that is true, because students really only have one thing to say and there is a tendency to just say the same thing on each item. (My speculation that in this case students recognize that their teachers did a lot of work to turn the course on a dime, and students did a lot of work also, and there was an in-this-together sense that they wanted to express.)