Experts Say Class Size Can Matter for Online Students

As an undergraduate pursuing a bachelor's in nursing, Ronda Clark was accustomed to taking online classes with 30 or 40 other students. She checked in to discussion forums as required, but felt she didn't have meaningful interaction with her fellow classmates. "It was a free-for-all," says Clark, a military spouse who lives on the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. "There was little organization."

So Clark was pleasantly surprised by the family nurse practitioner online master's program at Massachusetts' Simmons College, which she started in 2013. There, her classes had 15 people maximum and all discussions took place in a live video environment.

"A big class could be managed -- if you do it well -- but any learning environment should be a more intimate environment if you want to learn," says Clark, who plans to graduate in 2015.

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Class sizes can vary widely in online education, where enrollment is not limited by the constraints of a physical classroom. Massive open online courses, which some students can now take for credit, can contain thousands of students. Among the 187 ranked online bachelor's programs that submitted data to U.S. News in 2013, meanwhile, average class size ranged from one to 150.

The research behind class size in an online environment is inconclusive, says Kay Shattuck, director of research with Quality Matters, a nonprofit that helps universities and others design effective online courses. Still, plenty of experts believe that class size matters, and urge online students to think carefully about the size of their online classrooms before signing up for a course or a degree.

"You're going to have to understand as you move into the online world that more of the responsibility of the learning experience becomes yours," says Andrew McCollough, associate provost of the University of Florida. He says creating an ideal educational environment in large online programs is a "complex pedagogical problem" higher education is just now confronting.

Some experts argue that class size matters the most when online students are engaged in real-time discussions in which they can see each other on the screen. In the online world those are known as synchronous courses and are less common than asynchronous offerings, which allow students to log on when they please.

Chip Paucek, co-founder and CEO of 2U, the company that worked with Simmons to set up its online nursing program, says a small class size is a necessity in a synchronous environment. At schools that partner with 2U, the average class size is 10, he says.

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"Once you get more than 15 students there are too many faces on the screen," he says. With smaller class sizes, students feel more engaged with the material and more connected to their professor and fellow students, he says.

Having a smaller class size "makes it easier to have more intimate interactions," says Clark, the Simmons student. "In my program now, we call each other outside of class and even talk about personal things."

When it comes to asynchronous classes -- where students rely mainly on readings, prerecorded lectures and discussion boards -- experts are divided on whether students should pay attention to the number of classmates in a course.

"The overall class size doesn't matter as much as how the instruction is delivered," says Henry C. Lucas Jr., a business professor at the University of Maryland and author of "The Search for Survival: Lessons from Disruptive Technologies." To Lucas, who has taught both regular online courses and MOOCs, instructor engagement is more important than class size.

While students and instructors can interact in a larger class, it's sometimes more challenging to have more substantial interactions, he says.

"If there are 8,000 people in a course, the instructor can't answer emails," he says. "There has to be a staff of assistants and people assigned to address questions and problems in the course."

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Peter Hirst, executive director of MIT Sloan Executive Education, a continuing education division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's business school, agrees that student engagement with instructors and classmates is key to learning.To a certain extent, he believes instructors can create engaging environments in larger classrooms through the use of technology.

In his program, where classes can reach up to 100 students, instructors use virtual technology to break into smaller classes and have class discussions. But even technology has its limits, he says.

"If you move to a larger group than that, even using that technology, it becomes more impersonal and less engaging for the participants," he says.

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Devon Haynie is an education reporter at U.S. News, covering online education. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at dhaynie@usnews.com.