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What is the right number of students a teacher can teach?
Student-Teacher Ratio (STR, also called pupil-teacher ratio) has been an important criterion to determine the quality of teaching.
Student-Teacher Ratio (STR, also called pupil-teacher ratio) has been an important criterion to determine the quality of teaching.
Rightly so because the students need a certain amount of personalized attention. Accreditation and ranking frameworks in India and abroad have treated this as a significant quality standard in institutions.
But in the last decade, with the advent of MOOCs and now with COVID-19, the concept of STR should be rethought.
When a teacher is teaching online, it doesn't matter whether there are 10 or 10 thousand students on the other side. The content remains the same for each recipient. The issue however is how much of mentorship can the learner find.
A better framework may be a 'mentor-student ratio', where we have to consciously differentiate between someone who is delivering content and someone who is mentoring (they could be the same persons too). In the age of technology, mentorship is more scarce than content.
A student can find excellent content from anywhere in the world but institutions should provide mentorship so that students can make sense of that content in their own context. And these mentors need to be full-time employees of an institution.
At @RishihoodUni, we are bringing mentors from all across the world to spend time with students based on customized needs. You are building a start-up in digital art? Here is mentorship for you. Many other good institutions also do this.
This is the premise of accelerators and incubators - giving the right guidance & resources. Thus, in institutional quality standards, we should move towards a system of a mentor-student ratio. We can estimate how many 'mentor hours' are available to a student.
Given the dynamic and differential nature of students' needs, not everyone will require the same amount of mentorship. An even better standard than the mentor-student ratio could be the 'probability of mentorship'. If I request mentorship, how likely am I to receive mentorship?
The right set of guidance goes a long way in shaping a student. Let us rethink our institutional design to get them ready for the future rather than conform to the past.
