2.1 A narrative review of literature regarding class size in online  (Page 9/11)

"I think 15 is a real nice number because my fundamental concern is that administrators see this as a way of teaching 200 students with one faculty member. My distance education course started with 147 students and 22% of them finished with a C or better. My only concern is quality and that becomes a personal ethical decision. If I get paid per student my first thought is to get as many students as I can and make more money, but I can tell you that with 500 students a semester, maintaining this pace as I have for many years, I’m starting to get burnt out." (p. 6)

Another survey study was conducted by Reonieri (2006) with the purpose to determine the optimum size of online classes. Respondents were graduate students and faculty predominately from Thomas Edison College and with fewer respondents from another institution. Results indicated the participants believed the following: small online class size is equivalent to 5 to 10 students; medium online class size equals 10 to 15 students, and large online class sizes are noted at 15 to above 24 students. He indicated that a medium class would be the optimum size for quality online discussion boards. The recommendation for larger class sizes is to split the class in to smaller groups for discussion and work. Orellana (2006) also conducted a survey regarding typical class sizes for online courses. With the 131 respondents (instructors and researchers), the range of reported class size was from 4 to 81 with an average of 22.8. Almost 62% of the respondents reported having 20 or fewer students in their online courses.

Small studies regarding online classes

Class numbers are important according to Hislop’s (2001) study in which time logs of he and three other colleagues who delivered four pairs of 10-week graduate courses (pairs were one class online and one class face-to-face). The online classes clearly showed involvement of more days per term in which the instructor was involved in a course activity. However, Hislop’s findings in this small study were actually inconclusive, and he indicated that it was “premature to conclude that teaching online takes more time than teaching face-to-face if other factors are constant” (p. T1F-26). Along these same lines, Dibiase and Rademacher (2005) reported a study regarding time and class size. They explored the scalability and sustainability of an online class in geographic information science between two instructors. Though small in terms of a study with only two instructors participating, the yield is interesting. With an increase in class size from 18 to 49, the instructors increased their time from 47.5 hours to 116.7 hours. However, a graduate teaching assistant was used to evaluate student assignments and give feedback, so the instructor decreased his time by about 8% from 47.6 hours to 43.1 hours.

In another study on the instructor’s time commitment and class size, Tomei (2006) reported that online teaching demands a minimum of 14% more time than do traditional classes. The study was a self reflective study with 11 students in each type of class (online and face-to-face) during one semester. For the 11 student load, online delivery of the course content was 59.18 hours online compared to 41.25 hours face-to-face. Student advisement was at 40.43 hours online and 34.75 hours for face-to-face students. Assessment hours were noted at 56.22 hours for online students and 60.50 hours for traditional students. Tomei then provided a formula for determining online class size based on the hours she compared in both traditional and online formatted classes and based on 11 students and the typical number of hours for a class. Ultimately, his formula yielded a traditional class size of 17 students and an online class size of 12 students due to the online class demanding more time than the traditional class. Tomei ended the report of his study with “Online teaching should not be expected to generate larger revenues by means of larger class sizes at the expense of effective instructional or faculty over-subscription” (p. 540). Though Tomei’s study was limited in terms of it being a personal accounting of time in his classes, he does provide a promising foreshadowing of the type of calculation that can be attempted in determining appropriate class sizes. In that sense, more faculty members would be needed to address, analyze, and keep time logs of the concepts he included in his study in order to make a more broad generalization regarding class size in online education.