LearnCube specialises in providing virtual classrooms for tutoring and small interactive classes (maximum of 8 students). This aligns with our vision to improve the quality of online teaching while balancing price points, access and effective pedagogy.
To dig into this a little deeper, the practical number of students we would recommend does depend on a few things:
Your teacher's typical internet connection
Your typical student's internet connection
The distance between the teacher and the individual students
Your teacher's experience in teaching groups
How stable is your internet connection?
When you live stream video, this requires a higher speed and stable internet connection.
Internet speed is measured in megabytes per second (MBPS). Think of a connection like a pipe. A big pipe can deliver a much higher volume (of data) than a smaller pipe.
See here for our minimum requirements for teaching a class. But also be aware that internet speed is not the same as internet stability.
Your student's internet connection
Internet speeds range significantly between countries. In South Korea, Sweden and Japan the internet speeds are very high (18 MBPS).
In other regions, the internet speed is much lower e.g. South America (average 4MBPS), India (2.8 MBPS), Africa (average 1.5 MBPS). See here for a map of internet speeds around the world.
Think about the internet infrastructure available to the bottom 25% of your students with the slowest speeds and oldest devices.
The distance between students
Distance can make a difference, especially if you have student from every continent in your class.
If you're in Australia and all of your students are in just one region (i.e. Europe), you can be more confident that up to 8 students will work well.
If you're in Australia and your students come from several different countries and regions (i.e. UK, USA, Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, etc), you can still offer group classes with LearnCube and reduce the class cost, but just keep classes a little smaller.
For more than 8 students
It is very popular in some countries for teachers to want to teach classes of 20 or even 100 students.
We recommend that companies & teachers who want to offer both smaller group classes and larger group classes to use the right tool for the job:
LearnCube is amazing for 1:1 private classes, extraordinary for 1:8 small group classes and not yet available for 8+
Other web-conferencing tools offer an ordinary experience for 1:1 private and 1:8 group classes but are great for larger group classes that may not need so much teacher-student interaction.