Madison, Wisc.—The University of Illinois at Springfield capped online classes at 20 students each more than a decade ago, concerned that more would burn out professors. But does that limit make sense today?
During a distance-education conference here, Ray Schroeder, a Springfield online-learning guru, raised the prospect that his university and others may have to reexamine online-enrollment restrictions as budget pressures mount.
“Quite a few institutions are going to look at that, to see if they can let in 25, or maybe a few more, students, rather than opening additional sections of classes,” said Mr. Schroeder, director of Springfield’s Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning.
A class of 25 sounds like a luxury in an environment where an institution like Arizona State University has talked about cramming 1,000 students into lectures. But the volume of one-to-one feedback in online classes can make teaching them highly labor-intensive, especially for professors new to the medium.
Adding more students may erode quality and drive professors to adopt different online-teaching strategies, like assigning more group projects because they’re easier to grade, Mr. Schroeder said in an interview after his workshop on “Teaching in a Recession” at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, which runs through Friday here.
Beyond bigger classes, the recession is forcing information-technology departments to consider not renewing licenses for some e-learning products, such as learning-management systems and lecture-delivery tools, said Mr. Schroeder.
For some departments, he said, the alternative could be more layoffs.
Mr. Schroeder and his colleagues walked his workshop audience through a guide to free alternatives to commercial products. He also pointed out a daily blog, Recession Realities in Higher Education, that collects news about higher-education budget doom. It already has about 700 posts.
“It’s kind of a sad blog,” Mr. Schroeder said to laughter during his workshop. “You might get ideas. Or when you’re feeling bad about the way things are for you, you can at least say, ‘Well, we could be in Louisiana.’”
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4 Responses to Budget Woes Pressure Enrollment Limits for Online Courses
ctedept - August 6, 2009 at 3:54 pm
In order to have a successful online course, with authentic assessments, and interaction and feedback between and among students and teacher, class sizes must be closely watched. We cap our classes at 20 students, and ocassionally go over if a student needs a course for graduating that semester. However, even 20 is a lot of work, a lot of grading, and a lot of time. Personally I find 12-15 students to be ideal. Without a cap, I would have to work more than the 50-60 hrs a week I put in now (with committee work, scholarship, advising, etc. in addition to the teaching) or something would have to give.
cwinton - August 6, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Soon we will have DE classes presented to huge audiences with the atudents assigned to CA’s (contact assistants) who will handle all interaction, with GA’s (grading assistants) handling student submissions, and an MT (master teacher) who is really just composite presentation compiled from past editions of the course. It is always possible to increase class size at the expense of the learning experience. This has increasingly become the case with face to face classes, so why should DE be any different?
11132507 - August 6, 2009 at 4:59 pm
When enrollment goes up at a college, the folks in administrative offices understand that more students means more work to be done. So it’s hard to work up much sympathy for professors who complain that “even 20 is a lot of work.” You like the relationship between enrollments and your paycheck, suck it up.
nhancock - August 10, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Dear 11132507: The only relationship there seems to be between enrollments and my paycheck is inverse – as enrollments increase the real value of my paycheck decreases (faculty don’t get paid for overtime!). The same inverse relationship seems to hold between my paycheck and all of the following: the number of hours of work I invest in teaching, the number of committees I serve on, and the degree to which I am personally invested in and committed to my university. Enrollments at my university continue to climb even though over the past eight years faculty salary increases have averaged less than 5% (not even enough to keep up with inflation) and this year there were no raises whatsoever. Seems to me I’ve “sucked it up” long enough.