Course Cap Increases and Workload Creep: How to Fight Back

by James Hoff

In late August, as faculty across the university were preparing online courses for the fall, the CUNY and BMCC administration quietly, and without prior notice, added several seats above and beyond the agreed upon course cap of 25 to hundreds of online courses at BMCC. Despite the mountains of evidence suggesting that online courses should be capped much lower than in-person courses, (lots of studies suggests caps of 15 or lower) many faculty are now teaching more students per class online than they were before the switch to remote learning. This is bad for students and faculty, and with millions of dollars in CARES act money available to the University, it is both pedagogically and fiscally unjustified. According to the literature the optimal cap for undergraduate courses offered online is less than 20 Tomei (2006), but other researchers have argued that a cap of 12 is more appropriate for those new to online teaching Sieber (2005). Further, studies have also shown that in courses larger than 25, the amount of instructor involvement has far less impact on student engagement than in smaller classes, Parks-Stamm et al. (2017).

But these changes are also bad for faculty, our university, and our union. As figure1 shows, these increases at BMCC are rampant, affecting almost 2,400 of the 3,700 courses on offer for the Fall. Many have increases of two, three and four students (fig. 1), with the greatest share being between two and three students per class. This is a significant increase in workload for all faculty, and for those teaching three or four classes per semester; it is equivalent, in some cases, to an entire additional course per year. Worst of all, while it is clear that these course cap increases are a cost-saving device for the college and the university, such cuts actually hurt CUNY’s budget in the long term.

The total number of additional seats that were created by these course cap increases (see fig. 2) is equivalent to about 255 additional courses of 25 students each. That is a significant cost savings, but such faculty cuts demonstrate to the city and state that the university can seemingly always find ways to do more with less, which leads to even less future funding from the city and state. Avoiding such a vicious cycle of cuts as well as future increases to our workloads will require a vigorous campaign on behalf of the entire faculty. We must make it plain to the administration and the new president that we will not stand by and allow our workloads to be increased and our faculty to be laid off.