15. Conditions of Employment

15.1. Class Size

The most obvious is the class size. Although some economies of scale are definitely achievable through the use of technology for teaching (see, for instance, Bates, 2013), and there is no magic number as to how many students there should be per teacher, that instructor presence and the interaction between subject experts and students are critical factors in developing knowledge and skills needed in a digital age.

Although technology can replace the need for instructors for the transmission of content, the need for ongoing communication between teacher and students for deep understanding and the development of skills means that there soon becomes a limit, in terms of the number of students per instructor, beyond which the teaching rapidly starts to become ineffective, at least in terms of the knowledge and skills that matter most (Carey and Trick, 2013).

Thus the major challenge is in universities and some large two-year colleges, where first and second-year classes can number in the thousands, and even in third or fourth-year classes, in the hundreds. What can be done to ensure that teacher-student ratios are kept to a manageable size? Institutions have taken a number of different approaches to this challenge.