15:1 - Enough to keep the content and interaction from going stale while avoiding the potential chaos. Given the potential for varied demeanor of students and the associated levels of participation, this ratio also helps ensure your ability for adequate interaction, with the students.
This is an interesting question, as I just saw my extensive roster for the next semester! I feel that for me, an optimal online student-instructor ratio is 10-15 students. If the class has fewer than 10 students, it seems to impact discussion board responses. There is only so much one can say about a topic and with so few students, it is difficult to keep the discussion going for a week. More than 15 students becomes overwhelming with the number of responses. The interaction amongst students seems to remain distant. 10-15 students provides varied perspectives, not too few or too many; relationships develop over the course of the semester as the students continually respond to each other's posts; and as the instructor, it provides me with time to properly respond and interact with each student.
I agree with your assessment. I have worked for several years facilitating online courses after retiring from full-time faculty at a college in central Pennsylvania. I have had, as a part-time facilitator, up to 3 classes in a 15-week term with 33-35 students. The expectations by the university assigning these expected a minimum number of responses to be 50% of the students' responses. All a person needs to do is a little basic math to realize that it would take up to 20 hours/week just to answer Discussion responses. It does not include grading or synchronous sessions. The conditions are below copied from a spread sheet.
33 students in 3 classes taking an average of 6 minutes to 50% of each student response, assuming that each student must respond once to topic then 3 times to other students.
The ideal I found was to have 1 class/term with a maximum of 30 students. I could take an average of 10 minutes to respond to 100% of the student responses per week in 10 hours. I say an average time per response because some might take an hour including research I do plus the response. Others might take only 1 minute to reply to with a simple response.
(I am not sure how the spreadsheet copies to this screen, but I tried).
Students/class; Classes; Time to reply to 1 student in Minutes; Minimum replies/student; Minimum % of student replies; Total time for responses in Minutes; Minutes/hour; Total time for responses in hours.
33; 3; 6; 4; 50.0%; 1188; 60; 19.8.
35; 2; 6; 4; 50.0%; 840; 14.0.
30; 1; 10; 4; 100.0%; 600; 10.0.
Gloria,
I agree that it makes it really easy for the instructor, but what about the students? Can you really have engaging discussions between students when there are only 6 or 8? What would be your max.? I am not aware of many institutions that can make any return on investment for only 6 or 8 students in a course.
Herbert Brown III
Herbert
I'm with you on the lower ratio for writing-intensive courses. Helping someone with writing is brutally time-consuming. If you are serious about helping students it is a MASSIVE investment of time and energy, and the more students you have the less time you can provide real, substantive help.
John
We can, of course, agree to disagree. I have been involved in both quite extensively, and a good professor can be as effective in larger courses as it in the smaller ones. Now ... to a certain extent there is an intimidation factor with students in the larger courses, making approaching a prof a bit more rebarbative, but so few students take any advantage of professor office hours (in big or small classes) that the benefits ON BALANCE can outweigh the liabilities. I recognize my heresy on this topic, but as my experience supports my position, I will stick to my guns.
John
Eileen,
Great tip on the subject line to facilitate your email management. Email overload can happen rapidly.
Herbert Brown III
John,
This is certainly the response of many administrators regarding the higher freshman courses for brick and mortar schools. I would argue the point about student not wanting to interact. Many students just want to get through these courses with 100-500 students and do what is necessary to make that happen. In many cases the less interaction, the less headaches and easier process to get through it. However, is it BEST for the students? I would argue if you did an experiment and compared students satisfaction with the 500 seat class, versus classrooms of 20-25 with direct interaction and discussion, the mass majority of students would prefer the smaller classes - they would also likely view the class as more "meaningful" than the 500 seat lecture.
Herbert Brown III
John,
I like your argument. Most instructors feel that the "average" course ratio should be in this range and for similar reasons. I have personally found this range to be ideal for most classes. For some writing intensive courses, I try to cap the higher level a little lower for similar reasons - the ability to provide meaningful feedback in a reasonable timeframe.
Herbert Brown III
The optimal online student-instructor ratio is 6 or 8 students per instructor. This allow quicker turn-around time for communication via email and in the classroom.
Hello,
I find 15-20 students also to be the optimal student-teacher ratio. I recently completed teaching a course with 36 students. It became a bit tricky at times to keep track of all of the students and their inquiries.
One tip I advise students who have questions is to send me an email in a particular way, with a subject line such as:
MGMT444-1303A-05 Jane Smith Unit 1 APA Question
In this way, I can readily see the right class, student, unit, and question topic. This makes replying to students much more efficient and thus provides for a more effective teaching/learning environment.
- Dr. Eileen Wibbeke
Hi Herbert
If we are talking only online courses, I say that the 15-20 optimal number holds, but in bricks-and-mortar classrooms, I see no reason not to increase class sizes in undergraduate Intro courses to large numbers - 100, 200, 500? So long as the teaching method can support it, go for it. Most students in my experience don't care to interact with the professor in these classes anyway.
Someone willing to swim against the current!
John
Keith
I would not always agree with the fewer the better the feedback, as if you have too few students to have vigorous discussion, you will have very little to give feedback on.
I prefer classes of from 15 to 25 students, as any more and the grading becomes oppressive, and any fewer and there are insufficient voices to engage in meaningful discussion. Getting good conversations started and maintaining them requires a significant collection of voices contributing variety and, hopefully, a little controversy!
I think that the optimal online instructor-student ratio is dependent on the type of course that is taught. I have taught a lab course where my students had to do simulations for the lab exercises. I felt that it was easier to have a maximum student number of no more than 15. This allowed me the time to walk individual students though some of the lab simulations. For a course that was more lecture based, it was definitely easier to have more students. The max that I would want would be 30. One of the things that I like to do is to divide my larger class into smaller groups of maybe 10 students each. This allows for better interactions amongst my students. One of the problems that I find with the larger classes is that interactions are typically only seen with a select few students in the course.
Pamela,
As you note the content of the course and even the level of the course can have a great impact on the optimal ratio. Even with the software for math feedback, what do you think would be your MAX number of students in a class - optimally...
Herbert Brown III
It depends on the instructor and the course. Some courses require more time for instructors to respond back to their students. Such as english and research classes takes more time to critique. I am currently teaching math in which I use a program to give them direct feedback. The program automatically gives them feedback immediately once they complete each problem.
I have read a number of the replies and concur with the general consensus that the optimal ratio depends on the course but is generally 15-20 in the presence of ongoing dynamic discussion and assignment feedback. The courses that I'm involved in require substantive initials posts (150-200 words) with an expectation for a minimum of two reply posts.
Alan,
I have also taught at multiple levels and with all ranges of student enrollments. I believe most instructors have found the 15-20 or 15-25 optimal for most courses. I have experienced what you describe with the lower enrollments; however, in some specialty courses at the higher levels, the smaller number including 12 was more effective. There are so many variables. The main point is that there is no magic number and there are many factors that play in to the "ideal" or optimal ratio.
Herbert Brown III
Alan,
Is this consistent for ALL courses? I agree that a few more students can make the discussion richer; however, in writing courses it can make it much more difficult to get the appropriate feedback to students in a timely manner.
Herbert Brown III
