2.1 A narrative review of literature regarding class size in online  (Page 10/11)

Social presence, interactions, and class size studies

Hewitt and Brett (2007) studied the relationship between class size and student online activity patterns among 28 graduate online courses ranging in size from five students to 19 students at the University of Toronto. They found that larger classes are related to an increase in the number of notes written, decreases in average note size and the percentage of notes opened, and an increase in note scanning. There appeared to be a greater social presence in the larger classes (note that the larger classes were those of only up to 19 students). Qui (2010), in her mixed methods dissertation study led by Hewitt, expanded the work of Hewitt and Brett. She analyzed tracking logs from 25 graduate-level online courses (25 instructors and 341 students) and interviewed 10 instructors and 12 graduate students with diverse backgrounds. She found 13 to 15 students to be an optimal class size and four to five as an ideal subgroup size and determined that as class size increased, the total notes that participants read increased significantly. But, as class size increased, the percentage of course notes that students read decreased significantly (i.e., students were reading a smaller proportion of the course notes). In larger classes, participants were more likely to experience information overload and students were more selective in the notes that they read. A significant positive correlation was found between class size and total notes written. Students’ note size and grade-level score were negatively correlated with class size. The data also suggest that the overload effects of large classes can be minimized by dividing students into small groups for discussion purposes. According to a study by Burruss, Billings, Brownrigg, Skiba, and Connors (2009), social presence was less present in medium and very large classes as opposed to small classes among nursing students. They conducted an exploratory study with a very large sample on fully online students (1128 students—265 undergraduate and 863 graduate students). This is perhaps the largest sample size included in all the studies we reviewed. Burruss et al. classified their groups as very small classes (1-10), small (11-20), medium (21-30), large (31-40), and very large (41 or more). There were significant differences between small and very large classes related to graduate student reponses on issues of student faculty and peer interactions. Graduate students found the larger the class, the more difficulty or unwieldy the interactions became. Oestmann and Oestmann (2006) determined that online classes with fewer than 10 students yielded low interactions among students, but class sizes of 20 produced greater interaction; such numbers also appeared to affect learning outcomes with the larger class size having greater outcomes. As class sizes increased, graduate students were less satisfied. Kingma and Keefe (2006) studied student satisfaction in online classes at Syracuse University School of Information Studies and determined that student satisfaction is maximized with a class size of 23 to 25 students.