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  • The Educator-to-Student Ratio

    By Joshua Kim December 9, 2009 8:39 pm EST

    College teaching is transitioning from a craft model where a single faculty member designs, delivers and evaluates a course to a model that encompasses a range of professionals. This shift has been led by online courses, but is filtering out towards hybrid and on-ground classes. In this model a faculty member (subject matter expert) works with a team of learning designers, library subject specialists, media experts, and technologists to create and deliver the course.

    A team approach for developing and delivering effective online courses is a necessity. The online environment is unforgiving of poor pedagogy and course design, and requires the introduction of multimedia content and collaborative platforms to succeed. The business model of online course delivery, namely eliminating the need for physical classrooms and the ability to grow enrollment, has facilitated the funding of the course design/delivery team approach.

    As on-ground courses evolve to leverage more of the tools and techniques of online learning, such as robust use of the LMS's collaborative features and the incorporation of media, the team approach to course development will also become more prevalent. Here the business case revolves around increasing the effectiveness of learning, measured in terms of student evaluations, class-pass rates, and other evaluative research. Leveraging technology for teaching is essential for large classes to feel and act like small classes, a goal shared by both faculty and students.

    As we shift to a team course development and delivery model, an approach that lends itself particularly well to traditional lecture classes, the metrics to evaluate colleges and universities will ideally evolve as well. Currently, the U.S. News & World Report's college rankings methodology gives the student-to-faculty ratio a weight of 20% in its ranking process. This ranking fails to capture the investment of colleges and universities in academic computing and librarian staff who work directly with faculty members on course design, development and delivery.

    We should lobby for list makers such as U.S. News to add an "educator-to-student" ratio into their ranking methodologies. Classifying subject matter experts (faculty), learning designers, subject specialist librarians, media professionals and others who work directly on courses all as "educators" best describes how these professions are oriented. Giving weight to an educator-to-student ratio will provide incentives for colleges and universities to invest in the academic areas of computing and the library. A system that recognizes and values the contributions of a range of educators to the student learning experience, one that encompasses faculty and staff, would reward those institutions that have devoted more resources to teaching and learning.

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Comments on The Educator-to-Student Ratio

  • Educator-Student ratio
  • Posted by Steve Ehrmann , Director, The Flashlight Program at The TLT Group on December 10, 2009 at 9:15am EST

  • Faculty-student ratios are a suspect measure, because decades of educational research have failed to find much correlation in general between class size and learning outcomes. I'm guessing that's because, across most of the ratio's range and in most instances, the teaching/learning activities may remain roughly the same. I remember being a freshman planning to major in aerospace engineering at MIT in 1968; I'm sitting at a table in a 'seminar' on control theory in a full professor's office for an hour each time the seminar meets. He's lecturing, uninterrupted, for the full hour. We listen and take notes. There are six of us. It's really embarrassing each time I nod off because I'm seated directly across the table from him. But what a soporific voice! I learn to take verbatim notes as a strategy to stay awake. That skill is later invaluable when I do interviews for my dissertation.

    At any rate, perhaps it's time to do some research to see in what circumstances, if any, educator-student ratios predict learning outcomes. My guess is that this, too, will be too blunt a measure to show much correlation in general. But your thinking is a step in the right direction.

    The old model that faculty (usually alone) decide what students should learn and how they should learn. In a largely unrelated process, staff provide faculty with facilities that preserves the faculty's freedom of choice: information resources, classrooms, networks, etc. What you're suggesting (and I agree) is that more often we're going to need a team approach. My old department at MIT, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, recently renovated their curriculum and their building at the same time. The faculty, working as a closely knit team with staff collaborators, took a fresh look at the various activities students needed to engage in, in order to master the kinds of skills needed by a 21st century engineer. They realized, for example, that some of the most time-consuming, difficult activities needed to take place outside classrooms and outside classroom hours. So the team (which by now included architects they'd engaged) simultaneously created a new approach to engineering education called CDIO (Conceive - Design - Implement - Operate) and a building that would provide a 24x7 environment for students to learn to become engineers. Although you can't capture what was valuable about that with an educator-student ratio (and still less with a faculty-student ratio), that teamwork -- both faculty-faculty and faculty-staff -- was crucial in developing a major step forward in engineering education.

    PS For more on CDIO, see http://www.cdio.org. For more on this way of thinking about teaching and learning with technology, see http://bit.ly/ten_things_table.

  • Agree in theory but...
  • Posted by Nathan Benjamin , Product Director of Online Courses at MHHE Digital Group on December 10, 2009 at 9:30am EST

  • ..digital hasn't done a very good job of changing this ratio either. The proliferation of lecture capture software is one of the more disappointing trends in digital higher ed, as it mimics the modality of instruction where the student-teacher ratio is highest, and thus least effective. The self-paced benefit of it does little to change the fact that it remains a fundamentally passive model.

    I'm working on a tool that will not only level but invert the traditional student-teacher ratio, using a tagged and branching environment in which students can pursue their individual lines of inquiry and have their questions answers by numerous instructors, who are ideally some combination of leaders in their field and those local to each student's college (assuming they're different people).

    Digital tools on their own are not fait accompli of change. Another stirring example the page-turner online course architectures, again digital mimicry of a fairly ineffective learning model.

    Btw: you may remember meeting me on the street at Educause. Zip me an email as I'd love to get your input on what I'm working on here at MHHE.

    -Nathan

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