The shift from brick-and-mortar schools to learning before a small screen effectively disrupts the traditional education that most of us grew up with. Effectively, this makes online learning something very new to parents of young children, who have to weigh up the pros and cons.
With traditional education, we know smaller classes are better. This means that teachers get more one-on-one time with students, improving learning outcomes. Research indicates that smaller classes and more personal attention from teachers allow students to process information better and thus succeed through class materials faster.
But does this still apply to online schools? In South Africa, some public schools infamously see classes of more than 50 students per room, with a single teacher in charge. This severely reduces the amount of one on one time a teacher can apply to a learner, and thus negatively affects learning outcomes.
The shift to online learning and the new way of teaching
To combat this, parents may instead turn to options like online learning, which is more affordable, such as through institutions like the University of Cape Town (UCT) Online High School.
UCT Online High School attempted to answer the question, of whether smaller classes matter when you are learning with a screen.
In a blog post, the institution says that online class sizes only really matter when the number of learners per class correlates with school fees.
It cites a certain online school in the country that has annual fees between R116 000 and R506 000 per annum for classes of between 12 and 25 learners.
“It follows that online high schools that limit the number of learners in their virtual classes should have higher levels of academic attainment because, directly or indirectly, they have pre-selected for success in the price they set for admission,” the institution writes.
UCT Online High School instead says that classes must be done away with entirely and that learners should instead take part in more personally tailored learning paths – courses made for and to be followed by specific people, with specific ways of learning.
Class size doesn’t mean more interaction when it comes to online schools
Independent research seems to agree with UCT Online High School. A 2006 study from Nova Southeastern University in the US on optimal class sizes for online courses found that there was no relationship between the size of an online class and the level of interaction between learners and teachers.
Interaction in this case is being used as a metric to gauge how well learners are able to process information and thus “learn.” In a traditional class, more interaction between teachers and learners means better learning, or that is what the paradigm is.
But while teachers said that classes of 18.9 learners are “optimal” for online learning, the interaction didn’t depend on how many people were present.
Anyone who has ever attended an online class can attest to this. Sometimes full classes will continue for hours of just the lecturer talking, and sometimes small classes of three or four participants will see a more open conversation, which leads to more insights gained.
With the pandemic waning steadily, most students in South Africa have returned to actual schools, but a quiet minority have chosen to go the purely online route instead. In 2022, UCT Online High School enrolled over 5 000 students. In 2023, that number grow exponentially to over 8 000. Parents are seemingly flocking to more affordable options like online learning, especially with the economic conditions of the time.
The institution’s first year was marred by technical faults and some unhappy learners, however, the technology and in fact online learning as a whole is incredibly novel. So time will tell how their students fare in the coming years.
[Image – Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash]
