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teaching large classes
Recent Seminars
Strategies to Manage High Enrollment Online Courses
As class size increases, it may not be practical to keep all assignments, discussions, exams, and other activities exactly as before, but it is not always easy to know which adjustments will provide the best results. This seminar will help you meet the demands of teaching large online courses without compromising quality or expanding faculty workload.
audio Online Seminar • Recorded on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Student Engagement Tip: Give Each Lesson its Own Theme Song
The challenge of engaging students in a large, introductory political science course, motivated Christopher Soper [article referenced below] to start exploring whether music might help him better connect students and course content. He now opens every class session with a song, and selecting those songs is part of an extra-credit assignment in the course.
The Front Row: A Small Group Feel in a Large Class
Frustrated with the traditional lecture format in an upper-level chemistry class that enrolled more than 100 students, and envious of my teaching assistants who spent time in small recitations working on problem solving with my students, I designed an approach I call the “The Front Row.” It brings a small group feel into a large classroom.
Teaching Large Introductory Survey Courses
In general, would you agree that these introductory courses are some of the most poorly taught in the curriculum? And that really shouldn’t be a big surprise. First, there is no academic glory associated with this teaching assignment. In fact, it is often the newest (and least experienced) member in a department who gets “stuck” with the big introductory course, even though these courses happen to be among the most difficult in the curriculum to teach.
A Lifeline for Those Teaching Large Classes
Simon, who teaches very large economics classes wonders in a blog comment if the kind of facilitative learning described in the March 2 post is possible in mass classes. I’d like to use this post to address his query. First off, as any large course instructor knows, teaching those big, required, introductory courses is not easy. In fact, it may well be the most difficult teaching assignment given to teachers. In my mind this raises a host of intriguing questions about who should be teaching and taking those courses. But that’s a topic for another post.
Helping Students Develop Problem-Solving Skills via Online Discussions
Developing sophisticated but essential learning skills is especially challenging in large classes. That’s why we regularly report on strategies that faculty members have developed and are using in large classes. The cases in point here are three different biochemistry courses in which faculty members have been using online, asynchronous discussion groups to develop problem-solving skills.
Practicing Learner-Centered Teaching in Large Classes
Creating a learner-centered classroom involves more than just engaging students; it is a philosophical shift in how the instructor approaches the class. This 75-minute audio online seminar is a step-by-step guide to integrating learner-centered strategies into existing courses.
audio Online Seminar • Recorded on Thursday, July 15th, 2010
The Benefits of Using Classroom Assistants
I work in a department that regularly enrolls 250 students in first-year classes, as do many other departments in colleges and universities. In my case, the situation is complicated by a small graduate program, too few teaching assistants, and an inability to break the larger classes into smaller sections for discussion. This makes for a very challenging teaching situation. I use groups in the large class one day per week, using activities I described previously in The Teaching Professor (March 2003). Since then, I have worked on solving the staff problem with senior undergraduate students. I call them classroom assistants (CAs).
Tips for Managing Large Online Classes
The following tips from Susan Ko, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Maryland University College, will help you maintain course quality and interaction in large online courses:
Teaching Large Classes: Strategies for Managing Large Lecture Courses
Once I passed my 50th semester of introductory biology, I began to regret that my profession doesn’t have a real apprenticeship for teaching—why should every young professor facing his or her first big class…have to make the same mistakes I did and, perhaps more important, why should they not know that everybody…has the same problems?
