Group size and interactions in online courses

The Open University (OU) in England was set up in 1969 by the UK government to widen access to higher education. The university has over 160,000 students, almost all studying ‘off-campus’, currently categorised as distance learning in the HESA data, but this term may need updating. The OU has had a long-standing principle of splitting cohorts into groups of 25 students. With almost all UK courses currently delivered entirely online due to a lockdown, I want to know what effect group size has on interaction levels? Is there an optimum group size for highly interactive online courses?

Cohort numbers are important as we want to run courses with lots of interaction where students engage in active and collaborative learning that improves their outcomes. It is vital to keep costs down by controlling the volume of staff interaction provided, so classes are sustainable and represent value for money. We also want a balance for students with opportunities for interactions, but they do not feel lost and disconnected.

My first search found a great quote from a 1969 paper from The Journal of Social Psychology; ‘...as group size increases, individual participation decreases.‘ While this paper looked at on-campus, free discussion within small groups, it was a good starting point. With groups of two students, they have to be highly engaged, whereas groups of five provide individuals with a space to hide or take a step back. 

However, anecdotally from my teaching days, sometimes larger groups can create exciting conversations and develop a social norm of participation that does not happen in smaller groups. I assume that optimum group size might differ for synchronous and asynchronous learning activities, between different pedagogic approaches, teacher expectations and interaction levels, and technical and non-technical subjects.

Group sizes

I found some recommended size ranges include Sieber (2005)‘s 12 for instructors new to teaching online and Tomei (2006)‘s suggestion of 12 for postgraduate courses. Colwell and Jenks (as cited in Burruss, Billing, Brownrigg, Skiba, & Connors, 2009) suggest an upper limit as 20 for undergraduate and 8 to 15 for postgraduate. In a paper by Parks-Stamm et al. (2017), student interaction in classes of 14 or fewer students increased with more instructor participation, but this mattered less with larger groups of 15-30 students. Orellana (2006) states that 16 was perceived as the optimal group size by academics teaching online to achieve the highest level of interaction.

An Inside Higher Ed article interviewed several American universities with established online portfolios asking about optimum group size. The University of Massachusetts at Lowell have 28,000 online enrollments; they cap their undergraduate classes at 27 and postgraduate courses at 25 students. Granite State College in New Hampshire keep group sizes between 12-15 students, and on the other end, Brigham Young University at Idaho’s average class size is 37. The WCET a digital learning policy group for universities sets a ‘rule of thumb’ of 20-25 students.

Initial recommendations

I could not find anyone in my short search that recommended group sizes of over 27 students, but there were many suggestions that group size is not the best metric to use. Starting with the OU’s suggested groups of 25 students and then monitoring each is a good starting point. You can then monitor student performance, withdrawals, instructor response time, engagement measures, including the volume of student/instructor interactions, and student feedback. This data will allow you to assess if the group size, interaction levels, and course design meet the students’ learning and social needs. You could also provide regular opportunities for small-sized groups, including 2-3 students working together for students who would benefit from more intense interactions.

Efficiency and effectiveness


According to the Oxford languages site (the one Google search uses for definitions), efficient comes from the Latin efficere meaning ‘‘accomplish‘. It is defined as ‘achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense..’

Efficiency is the (often measurable) ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in doing something or in producing a desired result. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste

Wikipedia

Oxford languages define effective as ‘successful in producing a desired or intended result.’ It comes from the same Latin word efficere meaning ‘‘accomplish‘. 

Effectiveness is the capability of producing a desired result or the ability to produce desired output. When something is deemed effective, it means it has an intended or expected outcome, or produces a deep, vivid impression.

Wikipedia

In a world full of people chasing efficiency, be a person who is effective.

The moving University; Learning on your commute

We have had snow here in Leicestershire, England. My wife has been using my car recently and asked me to drive her to and from work. It turns out that a 3-litre supercharged rear-wheel-drive car is not the easiest thing to navigate slippery roads. While driving home and then back again on my own, I got the chance to listen to an audiobook. 

I used to have a 40-minute commute that gave me 80-90 minutes five days per week. I don’t miss the commute, but I do miss this learning time. There is something about listening while driving particularly on regular routes when you are almost on autopilot. I still listen to audiobooks on the turbo trainer or while doing housework, but something about driving seems to help me retain the information. 

Audiobooks for myself and other listeners do not tend to replace reading but rather augments it. Nielsen Book and The Publishers Association suggest that audiobooks listeners tend to be those who do not read much such as 25-44-year-old urban-dwelling males or audio is used for convenience, and when print reading is impossible. Audiobooks, and podcasts, are an art in their own right and can be more engaging for reluctant, struggling, and developing readers as listening to a human voice provides a stronger emotional response.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Naval Ravikant

Research from the National Literacy Trust suggests that audiobooks benefit children’s reading skills and enjoyment by widening their access to books. Listening to the books performed, deepens their understanding of tone, pronunciation, accents, and dialect. Further studies on reading comprehension in adults found no statistically significant differences in comprehension and recall between audiobooks and text ebooks either immediately after reading or two weeks later. However, reading dead tree versions of books is has shown to be slightly better for understanding, but more research is needed to know why. This difference is possibly due to the visual cue of how far you are through a narrative not present with digital books, or that print words are located in a specific place on a page to help people remember it.

Learning with Audiobooks

  1. Listen at normal speed don’t speed it up to get through the book quicker, be selective in your reading, give you brain space to process the words, and enjoy the experiences. 
  2. Listen to selected parts such as the introduction and conclusion if the book is bloated, you don’t have to listen to the whole book.
  3. Use Audible across multiple devices – mobile, kindle, laptop app etc. and use the Wisperlight feature between an audiobook and kindle version.
  4. Make some notes or set a bookmark once it is safe. Write a book summary once you have finished. Recalling the ideas, and putting them down in a document helps you retain the information.
  5. Share what you learn and have a conversation about it to reflect on what you’ve learned. Playing with the ideas in different contexts helps you not just remember the information but better understand it.

The Worlds Poorest Need Money

GiveDirectly is a charity that gives money directly to people living in poverty. The non-profit believes that by giving these people cash instead of other forms of aid, they can make choices that improve their lives. GiveDirectly’s research suggests that instead of buying alcohol, these people purchase medicine, livestock, schooling, clean water, renewable energy generators, and some use the money to start businesses. With no strings attached, cash is better for people living in extreme poverty in the most deprived places in the world. It allows individuals to get what they need rather than rely on international organisations to make educated guesses based on national or regional needs. Allowing cash to be spent in local businesses has so far shown to improved the economy with very little inflation.

GiveWell is an independent non-profit that lists the most high-impact and cost-effective charities that save or improve lives. GiveWell suggests supporting cash transfers for extreme poverty through GiveDirectly is one of the nine most impactful ways you can donate. They report that $83 of every $100 donated goes directly to participants of the charities programmes and that research shows this money improves recipients lives. You can read a full report into the charities impact on the GiveWell website.

GiveDirectly’s funders and partners include UK Aid, USAID, Google.org, Givewell, Good Ventures, and The life you can save. Current cash transfer programmes include:

The Basic income project is the largest and longest-term Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment globally and is run in partnership with researchers at MIT and Princeton University. The project is working in rural Kenya with 295 villages in the Western and Rift Valley region. There are four groups; a long term and a short term group that is given $0.75 per adult per day monthly for 12 years and two years, a lump sum group was assigned the same amount as the short term group but in a single one-off payment, and a control group. So far, the cash transfers recipients have shown improvements to well-being measures including hunger, sickness, and depression and have so far weathered the pandemic better than the control group. 

It is important to note that this is a study on the long-term effects of giving cash to people living in some of the world’s most impoverished areas and not studying how UBI might work in more prosperous regions like the UK. I am interested in the impact of the project, and I want to support it financially. The idea of giving money to those in extreme poverty over other types of aid makes sense intuitively, and I like that such a detailed study is being carried out to understand if this is a better way to end poverty.  

You can contribute to the project on the GiveDirectly website. Alternatively, you can donate to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund, and they will give your money to where they believe it will help most.

Point A to Point B

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Archimedes

Much of the work we do in educational technology helps people understand where they are, where they want to be, and then support them to achieve it. In the book Intervention, Dan John‘s process working with athletes has many parallels with our work with academics.

Some teams, departments, or universities know precisely where they want to be-Point B, but they are not clear on where they are now, Point A. In this situation, our job is to identify their current position, then create a plan to reach their goal. Others know exactly where they are but need help to see a realistic goal, requiring ideas, standards, and progressions. A third more common group is unrealistic about their Point A and/or Point B and needs help to identify both before making a plan and starting work. We need to know both point A and point B to draw the line between them.

There are things that everyone we work with needs; ideas of innovative practice to improving student experience, more straightforward and better-integrated technology, comprehensive training and support, and a clear development process. We also need effective project management and a schedule that takes into account the academic calendar. But some tools can help assess where a team is on their journey and the next step in their progression, such as the Quality Matters Standards, the OLC’s Quality Scorecard, and the SAMR learning model. 

But,

  • If people know the goal, assess where they are and connect the dots.
  • If people know where they are now, but either want an unrealistic goal or do not know what they want, show them the next step and connect them.
  • With everyone, always focus on the process and the keys to success. 

If you are currently working on your service offer, spend some time on a set of questions and a collection of principles to find Point A, Point B, and the most direct route. A systematic approach to educational developments will help you find the straight line.

Social norms

Social norms are incredibly impactful on our behaviour and happiness, and a person’s social network creates these. The impact of social norms can help us understand why people behave the way they do and have adverse outcomes counter to their goals. Deliberately cultivating your social network allows you to create social norms to help you live the life you want.  

Research carried out on the Framingham Heart Study, covering 12,000 people over 30 years found that obesity, smoking, and happiness levels appear to spread through social ties. The researchers wanted to know how social factors affected the spread of behaviours friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbours. The research found substantial impact, not only in a person’s immediate network but also across three degrees of separation in social networks. 

In the study of the spread of obesity, researchers found clusters of obesity that could not be explained by overweight people selectively choosing to be in networks with overweight individuals. The study suggested that your chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if you have a friend who becomes obese. The effects did not appear to be related to the levels of obesity in neighbours or people in the same geographical location. Interestingly the influence was more substantial when the social connection was with a person of the same sex than from someone of the opposite sex.

Follow up study looking at the person-to-person spread of smoking behaviour concluded that social ties had a similar effect on smoking. The study suggested that whole groups of people were quitting together, a person’s chances of quitting were improved by 67% if their spouse stopped, 25% if a friend stopped, and 34% if a coworker stopped smoking. Again, the effects did not seem to be impacted by neighbours. Education levels did affect smoking behaviour changes, clusters of more educated friends having more influence on each other.

The same researchers then used a subset of the data to ask if changes in happiness spread within social networks. The study found that an individual’s happiness depends on the happiness of people in their network. The effect was again seen up to three degrees of separation, meaning your happiness is impacted by the friends of your friends’ friends. Changes in happiness are affected by your social network within your immediate geographic location and are reduced time and geographical distance.

People around us have an enormous impact on our behaviour due to the social norms created by members of this group. Social norms are the collective behaviours we perceive as acceptable, both in the actions people in our social group show us and the group’s approval in reaction to that behaviour. If people in our friendship group normalise behaviours like weight gain, smoking, or happiness, then it changes how we think and what we feel we should do. This can help explain why some people find it hard to lose weight, save money or exercise even when they know it is the right thing to do and desperately what to do it. 

It is important to note that we are an active part of the social networks we belong to. We should make deliberate choices in all aspects of our lives to create social norms that align with what we want in life by selecting the groups of people we interact with most and our reactions to their behaviours. 

2021 daily routine.

My first blog set out my daily schedule, but since then, with all the writing and research I have done each day, I have updated my routine significantly. I have linked to the posts where I have written about any additional daily practice. This routine is the idea but is regularly altered based on the work I am doing that day. I have recently added several daily techniques to improve my sleep, making this list much longer than the original.

I put regular four-minute movement breaks throughout the day, including the 100-Up exercise, between meetings or after every 25-minute Pomodoro. My bike workouts are following a five-month programme to improve my four kilometres Individual pursuit power. My strength training is a mix between squatting everyday, heavy kettlebell swings, and the Rite of passage kettlebell programme.

6:00 Wake up

  • 10-100 sit-ups
  • 5-minute activity to wake up and get the heart rate going
  • Weigh myself
  • Protein shake
  • Granola

7:00 – 

8:00 – 9:00* – Get a coffee and start work

9:00 – Daily stand-up

9:30 – 12:30* – 2 hrs of deliberate practice (Work)

12:30 – Lunch

15:00 – 18:00* – Strength session

18:00 – Cook, eat, and spend time with my wife

19:00 – Daily blog

20:00 No more food

21:00 – Bedtime

  • Clean the kitchen
  • 10-100 sit-ups
  • Read in bed on the kindle Oasis 
  • Take ZMA

21:30 – 11:00* Sleep 

*Sometime within this period

Thirteen tips for getting better sleep

I go through stages of having issues sleeping. I usually find it easy to go to sleep, but either dance around like a fish out of water or wake up between 2 am and 4 am and then don’t get back to sleep. If you sleep like a baby, ignore these and keep doing what you are doing, but one or more might help if you have issues like me.

  1. Have a sleep routine: go to bed and get up at the same time each day, even on weekends to take advantage of your natural circadian rhythm.
  2. Sleep for between six and nine hours every night: The amount of sleep you need is dependent on several factors, set a fixed wake-up time and move around your sleep time depending on how you feel each morning until you find the duration you need.
  3. Get as much sleep before midnight as possible: research suggests that this is when the best quality sleep happen. Set your bedtime between 9:30 and 11:00 pm.
  4. Get light outside for at least 30-60 minutes per day: Getting out right after you get up will help anchor your master clock that controls your circadian rhythm. A lack of Vitamin D affects sleep, so supplement if you don’t get exposed to a lot of sunshine, particularly in Winter.
  5. Don’t eat anything after 8 pm: Leaving time between eating and going to bed will allow your insulin levels to get back to normal.
  6. Have a wind-down routine: have a hot bath, write a todo list to get things out of your head, do some light relaxation stretches, listen to relaxing music, read a book (use a Kindle Oasis with no blue light)
  7. Avoid screens for at least an hour before you go to bed: blue light from screens will trick your brain into thinking it is daytime and make it harder to get to sleep.
  8. Don’t drink coffee after 1 pm: Caffeine can affect people for up to six hours after a coffee. If you can, only use coffee for those times when you need a cognitive boost.
  9. Make your bedroom a cave: keeping your bedroom dark, quiet, and at a cool temperature (between 18C and 24C) to help you get to sleep quicker.
  10. Eat more protein during the day and carbs at night: Protein is a mild stimulant and carbs activate the orexin pathway that makes you sleepy. 
  11. Take a ZMA supplement 30 minutes before sleep: The magnesium specifically aids sleep but prepare for some strange dreams the first few nights. 
  12. Exercise but not too much: Staying active throughout the day is essential for your general health and insulin responsiveness, but training twice per day or long and intense cardio sessions will negatively affect sleep. Consider regular movement breaks if you work at a desk all day and strength training three times per week between 3 an 6 pm.
  13. Track your sleep and monitor things that affect its quality: I wear my Garmin running watch at night to monitor my sleep duration and quality during periods where I don’t sleep well. I find I get good sleep duration but low quality with minutes of deep sleep in the single figures. Tracking your sleep will help you learn which of these tips you can ignore and which you need to follow.

Sixteen hours per week of deliberate practice

I have been reading and watching a lot of the late Charles Poliquin this week. In a video this morning, he talked about the amount of learning you need to do to be world-class at what you do:

Eight hours per week is the minimum you need to learn… The people that make the most money in their profession learn sixteen hours a week… The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.

Charles Poliquin

Charles Poliquin was well-read and based all his recommendations on expert knowledge, so I spent some time looking for this recommendation’s origin. I returned to the ‘Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance‘ paper by K. Anders Ericsson to see how these recommendations for developing masters compare. The article presents research from multiple sources that it takes ten years or more of necessary experience to develop the skills to produce outstanding work at a world-class level. This practice should be time-limited at 2-4 hours per day, every day, for many years. This recommendation was present in research on experts from chess, musical composition, mathematics, tennis, swimming, long-distance running, scientists, authors, and poets.

The average age of the first published works was 25.2 for scientists, and 24.2 for authors and poets and the average age at which they published their most remarkable work was 35.4 for scientists and 34.3 for authors and poets. There was an average of more than ten years between the scientist and authors first work and their best without considering the time it took learning and writing to get to the first publication. The highest performance levels were not attained just by years of experience but by deliberate efforts to improve slowly over a very long time.

Deliberate practice is a set of activities that are most effective in improving performance. It requires the motivation to do the task and effort to improve performance. These activities are repeated consistently with slight variation and should provide immediate informative feedback. The idea of deliberate practice in developing scientists and artists is very similar to athletes and musicians’ development. This development involves years of intensive preparation under an expert teacher, total emersion in the field, and most importantly, identifying the most likely activities to result in the desired achievements.

When looking at scientists, the highest performing are also those who produce a larger number of publications than others in their field. This would suggest that writing to develop arguments would be the deliberate practice that helps them develop a new published theory or idea. Writing is a demanding activity; most world-class scientists stick to a rigid daily schedule that involves writing as the first significant activity of each morning and is time blocked to 1-2 hours, leaving the rest of the day to other work.

In virtually all domains, there is evidence that the most important activity – practice, thinking, or writing- requires considerable effort and is scheduled for a fixed period of time during the day. For those exceptional individuals who sustain this regular activity for months and years, its duration limited to 2-4 hours a day, which is a fraction of their time awake.

K. Anders Ericsson

Two to four hours per working day would be equal to ten to twenty hours per week. To hit Charles Poliquin’s sixteen hours of learning per week target, we would require just over three hours of learning or around 40% of a typical eight-hour working day. The question then is, what is a Learning Designer’s deliberate practice that will allow them to become world-class, and how do I provide an environment to help Learning Designers do this deliberate practice to gain mastery?

The length of time between each iteration of a course makes the day to day work of a Learning Designer unsuitable as deliberate practice, so I need to find something more immediate. My wife is launching a company and becoming active on social media to market the brand. The kinds of skills she is learning are very similar to those that make an excellent Learning Designer—developing Learning Designers as Youtubers might be an effective strategy. Youtubers produce regular video content that is published, continually work to improve all aspects of quality, operate on social media and interacting with viewers to drive traffic to their youtube site, and using the analytics tools to track activity and inform future content. This might be a crazy idea, but it might just work.

Focus and flow with the Pomodoro technique

The Pomodoro technique is a simple way to increase your productivity and is particularly useful when working from home. You work in intervals of focused work with breaks of rest away from your desk. The breaks help your brain focus, gives space to assimilation new information or incubate new ideas, builds in time for you to make a coffee or use the toilet, and provides an opportunity for movement breaks.

The basic idea 

  1. Select a task or set of tasks
  2. Set a timer for 25 minutes
  3. Get your head down and work uninterrupted until the timer goes off 
  4. Take a 5-minute break away from your desk before starting step one again. 
  5. After a set of 4 Pomodoros, you give your self a 15-30 minute break.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s law

The six objectives

Once you are in the habit of separating your working day into Pomodoros, the 25-minute work intervals and breaks, work through the six objectives in sequence, only moving one once you have mastered the current objective.

  1. Time tracking – Become great at estimating how long tasks will take by tracking how many Pomodoros you need to complete all your focused work.
  2. Lazer Focus – Protect your work interval from all interruptions, extend the breaks to call people back or deal with emerging issues, but when you work you work.
  3. Estimate time needs for all tasks – Use your estimation skills gained from objective one to estimate how many Pomodoros you need for all activities in your todo list.
  4. Make your work interval more effective – Start your work interval with a few minutes to recap what you have done and end it with a review.
  5. Create a schedule – Plan out each day according to your todos and time available, scheduling in Pomodoro sessions in the slots available between commitments.
  6. Create your a personal objective – Come up with an objective that will make you more focused or better find time to complete your work.

Learn more in the Pomodoro Technique Handbook by its creator Francesco Cirillo.