Establishing class size policies for optimal course outcomes in online undergraduate education programs

ABSTRACT

The long-term shift toward online learning over the past two decades was greatly accelerated by COVID-19, heightening the urgency in higher education for policies meant to better optimize online environments for student learning. The determination of class sizes for online courses is one such policy. In this hierarchical linear regression of undergraduate students’ grades in online courses (n = 6,615), we found a significant but negligible positive relationship between section size and students’ final grades. Among other findings, we found little evidence to conclude that class size policies have any substantive relationship to students’ end-of-course grades in online environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Class size
• higher education
• online learning
• multilevel modeling
• course outcomes

Acknowledgements

We thank Patricia Marsh and Kattie Dolan for extracting and anonymizing the data used in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.