Enabling High Quality Teaching and Learning for Large Classes

Kirti Garg and Vasudeva VarmaInternational Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H)

Hyderabad India{Kirti, vv}@iiit.ac.in

Abstract

Providing high quality learning environment is always a challenge. This challenge increases manifold for large classes due to pragmatic considerations of academic and administrative nature. Large classrooms also provide an opportunity to enrich the learning environment and make it more vibrant but it requires careful design to utilize the opportunity while managing the complexity. This paper discusses administrative, pedagogical and assessment related challenges that affect the quality of learning and teaching, thus requiring a well-designed large learning environment to manage the complexity and maintain quality. Further, we will discuss strategies and practices to manage these challenges. These are grounded in sound learning theories and some have been implemented and validated in our software engineering classrooms. These strategies can act as guidelines to design and customize the learning environments, thus helping the educators who find large classes challenging.

Keywords

Large classrooms, computer science education, student learning, administrative issues, personalized learning

1 Introduction and BackgroundEvery faculty aims at teaching effectively irrespective of class size. Unfortunately, imparting quality education is a challenge and this challenge is increased manifold for large classes. Large classes may pose two-kinds of problems, namely: administrative and pedagogical.

The challenges lies not in increased grading workload, rather in incorporating and implementing teaching and learning best practices such as active learning, personalized learning in order to ensure that learning goals are achieved successfully. Teaching and administrative approaches that have been successful in small classes may become incompatible with large classrooms and require significant change. Some pedagogical approaches may remain the same, but introduce newer administrative difficulties.

Before we dive into the details, we define a large class. There is no fixed number that can make a class large. A class is considered large depending on the prescribed student-teacher ratio and faculty preferences. This ratio in turn depends on instructional approach and learning objectives. In India, 25:1 ratio is the ideal student to faculty ratio prescribed for science courses at an UG level [11]. For engineering courses, the prescribed ideal ratio is 15:1, to be maintained for practice/lab work, but with flexibility of 60:1 for lectures [9]. But such norms can rarely be followed owing to practical considerations.

There are various reasons that lead to large classes. Lack of experienced faculty and infrastructure are the most common factors resulting in large classrooms. Popularity of certain courses or programs adds to the challenge. The class sizes may not be limited to a manageable 40 or 60 and might even cross 200. Large enrollments are very common in first level compulsory courses in popular programs like computer science. However, the situation eases with introduction of electives or advance courses since enrollment in these courses is comparatively low.

Economy of scale is another factor observed mainly in private institutes. In order to generate revenue that will eventually pay for more resources and staff, institutes increase student intake. The intake is regulated by authorities, who prescribe lower bounds on the infrastructure. But the pedagogical changes are usually not prescribed by such regulations, are considered micro issues and its assumed that the institute /faculty will handle them.

Apart from the presence of large number of students, large classrooms have certain characteristic features. Large classrooms are usually diverse in nature. Students with different prior knowledge, learning styles, capabilities and interests come together to learn a common topic. There may be extremes of students for each possible variation. Learning principles suggest that a good faculty will accommodate diversity in class while helping students build new knowledge on the prior knowledge. This prior knowledge may include ideas and misconceptions about real world. Managing this aspect of large classrooms is another issue that requires major pedagogical changes as well as poses challenges before the faculty. There is no conclusive evidence from research to tell that large classrooms always negatively affect a students learning. Some studies suggest that larger classes can negatively affect a student learning. This negative effect is seen on motivation and attitude of students and faculty. There is also a problem of perception, that though students may have learned the material, the class room experience may not be as satisfying as it could have been in smaller classes.

Many first level courses tend to keep the learning objectives limited to knowledge, understanding and application. Typically traditional lectures are the pedagogical means for the same. But traditional lectures require a major make over in large classrooms to maintain same effectiveness. The situation gets even more complex in courses that include higher order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation or complex problem solving. Traditional lectures are not considered suitable for the purpose and it is required that the faculty modifies them considerably to introduce elements such as of active learning or use alternate pedagogies altogether. Large classes are in general not considered suitable when the learning objectives include these higher order cognitive skills [1].

Typical administrative issues in large classes are related to magnitude of grading, maintaining discipline, record keeping including attendance, controlling plagiarism, managing coordination and communication in a large group of Teaching Assistants (TAs) if any etc.

The learning issues we consider include the following: choosing the optimal pedagogical approach in accordance with learning goals, ensuring that students achieve a minimal level of competency (achieve at least some learning goals to a prescribed competency), avoiding impersonalized learning, dealing with uninterested students, invoking discussions in class, designing meaningful yet manageable assessments etc.

Please note that the administrative and learning issues and even various administrative issues are not mutually exclusive. There are dependencies and trade-offs. For example, a substantial set of TAs may be required to manage the huge amount of grading. This introduces the need of TA management i.e. work division, selecting knowledgeable TA, devising reliable grading criteria, document sharing etc. Similarly, when an alternate pedagogical approach such as Project Based Learning (PrBL) is used, more support staff may be required to help students in executing projects. Careful design of projects and related assessments are the issues that require faculty’s attention now.

The simplest and most intuitive solution to manage large classes will be to convert them into smaller ones, but this is also the idealistic solution and does not consider the pragmatic constraints such as lack of sufficient resources especially faculty. Faculty with relevant industry experience is hard to kind and keep. Even if such faculty is available, they may not be effective as teachers. Thus this rare mix of practical knowledge and effective teaching is much desired, but not easily found. Even if such a faculty is available, and the class is split for enhancing the teaching effectiveness, delivery of same content may take some toll on faculty despite marginal increase in preparation time. The faculty may have to sacrifice of other duties like research.

Increasing the resources somehow will address only partial problem, the administrative one. Dynamics of a large class are different. Learning and teaching theories useful in a small class may be no longer applicable. Large classes require pedagogical modifications to ensure that learning objectives are achieved and quality of learning is maintained. Management of large classes requires more preparation, more structure, more formalized procedures and more rules than small classes.

Thus large classes are to be managed through careful design of the learning environment that includes content, pedagogy and assessment, bounded by a framework of structure, and guided by well-defined managerial and technical processes.

Please note that we do not consider large classes as liabilities. They have a huge learning potential. They are an opportunity to bring very diverse views to the classroom, hence enhancing the learning when appropriate pedagogical models of learning such as active, reflective and collaborative learning are used. Large number of students means large scale projects can be done under authentic settings, which is not only more realistic, but helps student to learn and practice soft skills and hence holistic learning. Large classrooms pose unique challenges for the faculty and in turn provide opportunities for honing their teaching skills.

In this paper, we will first discuss the administrative and learning related issues and challenges in detail. We validate the issues based on a small informal survey we have conducted. We present administrators’, faculty and a students’ view on various issues. Then we will present strategies that have been found to be effective in addressing these issues and challenges. We will discuss a small case study of a Software Engineering course, where some of these techniques were employed and found effective.

We are hopeful that this discussion may provide useful ideas to the teachers facing similar issues. These are mostly the best practices and require careful consideration of resources, learning objectives and student background.

2 Issues and challenges2.1 Learning related issues and challenges

Ideally learning in a class should be independent of class size. The issues and challenges of large classes are very similar to those seen in small classrooms, just that the magnitude of class affects magnitude of the problem. Large classrooms have different dynamics than smaller ones, hence giving rise to many newer issues and challenges for the faculty. We

will discuss the most important ones here. Many closely related issues have been discussed together for better understanding.

2.1.1 Ensuring every one gets to know the basics

Faculty has to ensure that all students achieve the learning objectives to some extent. They may establish criteria’s such as minimum pass levels for each learning goal. But the diversity in class can make it a difficult task to ensure that an average student reaches this minimum pass level. This may require that the faculty interests unwilling student to be attentive and learn in class. Students may loose interest for many reasons including monotonous, un-interactive lecture delivery, nature of subject, inability to hear the faculty or even getting distracted by a noisy peer.

2.1.2 Managing interaction in class and outside class

Interactive classrooms are not only interesting, but allow opportunities for doubt clearing, feedback and removal of misconceptions. These are very important for learning effectiveness. In class interaction is usually in form on asking questions, discussions, students raising doubts and seeking clarifications, answering quizzes etc.

Facilitating student-instructor interaction is one of the most worry some aspect in large classes [5, 4, 10 ].

A major difficulty in in-class interaction is evoking discussion in the class. In large classes, many students do not ask questions due to lack of interest, peer pressure, shyness or the fear of breaking the flow. Many students do not participate in discussions. It is difficult for the faculty to remember student names and call upon students, due to impersonalized nature of large classes (see next section).

2.1.3 Personalization of Learning

Not knowing the students is not just limited to not knowing the names of students. Familiarity with students creates a conducive learning environment. Familiarity with student’s background, prior knowledge, learning styles helps the faculty to tailor the teaching style to facilitate students learning, which is an effective learning principle. In absence of this familiarity, faculty cannot plan a customized interactive, engaging session. All decisions are based on some general features of the class like the topics studied in previous semester. This lack of personalization is another bothersome issue with large classrooms [10, 3]. Faculty cannot decide the level at which lectures should be pitched or pick right examples that may appeal to the crowd. Faculty cannot easily identify the student at risk and provide remedial measures.

2.1.4 Choice of Pedagogy

Choice of optimal pedagogy is a function of class size, the subject and the larger field, classroom dynamics, faculty’s personality and physical environment of class including its layout [6]. Now as soon as we move towards larger classes, the number of student change, we move to larger physical classrooms with mostly traditional lecture like settings. Student dynamics may also change in these large classrooms. Thus many student centered learning approaches [2,6, 8] are not applicable directly. The student centered or learner centered approaches requires students to become more active and more responsible for their learning and hence more open to variations. Group work, discussions

etc. become important. The teacher centric learning puts the onus of student learning on teacher, making student mostly a passive recipient and the learning environment more formal and structured [2, 6]. Since larger classrooms require structure and formalism, pure student centered approaches such as problem based Learning (PBL), though desired, cannot be used in its purest form.

But even the most used teacher centered pedagogy of conventional lectures may not be the best pedagogical choice for large classrooms. These are often monologues by the faculty where students are mostly passive listeners. Though lectures are the simplest means of teaching, they may be problematic in teaching large classes because [10]:

It is difficult to maintain student attention due to prolonged inactivity

More difficulty in stimulating higher order thinking skills such as synthesis or evaluation or problem solving

Reduced flexibility within the curriculum; Almost fixed contents and structure

Notes taking, providing lecture notes, rigorous performance based exams, power point slides do the resolve the issues since they all do not require the student to think actively and engage in learning [10].

Thus traditional lecture based approach should be modified to make them more engaging, adopt techniques to support flexibility of curriculum and incorporate techniques that can support all cognitive learning goals to some extent. This may require the introduction of active and reflective learning and some scope for collaborative learning. The central idea is to make classrooms engaging, interactive and customizable for better learning.

2.1.5 Designing meaningful assessments

A learning environment is incomplete without appropriate assessments. Large classrooms require effective yet manageable assessments. The assessments are to be designed in accordance with learning goals. Many faculty resorts to collaborative learning in large classrooms. But collaborative learning requires very meticulous and thoughtful preparation of assessments.

2.2 Administration issuesMost issues associated with large classes are administrative in nature. Some of these result from choice of pedagogical approaches. The problems and issues frequently reported in both the literature and observed in large classrooms are:

2.2.1 Organization

Lack of proper planning and pre-preparation often results in problematic classrooms. Large classrooms require meticulous preparation of teaching material, procedures, protocols, communication etc. A lack of pre- preparation often results on less efficiency and productivity where faculty has to spend time in dealing with the side effects of failure resulting from lack of planning as well as ensuing that problems do not reoccur.

2.2.2 Discipline in Class

Managing large number of students with varied interest levels is not easy. Students attending, lectures in large classrooms have the tendency to lose interest after a while. They may start making noise, trickling in slowly, or coming late, disturbing other etc.

2.2.3 Managing the Volume of Grading

Grading is the single most troublesome aspect in large classes. Choice of assessment methods, time taken for assessment, operationalization, all get affected due to presence of large number of students and lack of sufficient resources to tackle them. Some of the identified issues include:

Excessive grading load: It takes time and resources to grade assessments. The time also affects the promptness of feedback, which is very essential for students in first level courses. It is difficult to provide feedback at a sufficient level that can help students improve rather than a quick remark. Grading quickly becomes a mechanical task, feared by the grade(s) and not relied upon by the students. Faculty may choose convenience over validity. Many faculty moves towards objective type questions that can be graded quickly but they cant be used for formative assessment of higher order cognitive skills or even application skills, unless formed very carefully. More reliable and valid choices such as essay type questions, application oriented case studies are not the obvious choice.

Plagiarism: A major issue with assessment in large classes is monitoring cheating and plagiarism. Detecting plagiarism usually requires resources. Again, carefully designed assessments may help to avoid plagiarism to some extent, but designing appropriate assessments is a challenge in itself irrespective of class size.

Reliability of grading scheme: Reliable grading schemas or grading rubrics are required. Usually many TAs are employed in a large class for grading purposes. It is utmost important to have reliable grading schemas, so that grading can be consistent across students or across exams.

2.2.4 Taking Attendance

Though this issue may seem very trivial, but its takes toll on the faculty and steals away the valuable teaching time. Attendance is the time when faculty can know all students. A quick and hurried attendance may build a perception that faculty is attendance is merely a formality. There are cases of proxy attendances, again difficult to detect and handle in large classes.

2.2.5 Support Staff and tutor management

Faculty has been managing large classrooms through help of support staffs such as tutors, lab assistants and student teaching assistants. Employing student teaching assistants offers mutual advantage to both the students and the faculty. Employing teaching assistant is a way to offer monitory benefits to students and preparing them for future teaching assignments. Often large numbers of assistants are utilized in large classes. Managing these support staff also becomes an administrative issue. They need to be trained about course specific details, grading policies, consistent grading, following course protocols, handling student queries etc. Work distribution, task assignment,

coordination and communication with these support staff is a big administrative task. Success of courses often depends on this effective utilization of support staff.

2.2.6 Establishing Communication

Student faculty communication can be the single most time and energy consuming aspect of a large course. Faculty often tries to implement an open door policy, and suggest student to email or meet if needed. The volume of student enquiries and interactions may soon become a major strain on time and resources, and disturb the schedule quite easily. Similarly information dissemination about the courses, assignments, announcements, examination etc. should be done carefully since the cost of error may become high.

A well-defined protocol for communication is to be established. This includes setting up broadcast channels, office hours policy, email communication guidelines such as subject lines and likely response time, protocols for material and document distribution, establishing a chain of command for communication etc.

2.2.7 Giving and taking feedback

This exchange with students as well as support staff is necessary for successful running of course. The feedback to the faculty helps to tailor the course as per needs and keep an eye on unwanted disturbances. Feedback to the students especially the first year students helps them track their progress at an early stage in the course and ensure that they get maximum benefit from the course. This feedback can be through assessments, or in lab or tutorial sessions.

2.2.8 Organizing practical activities

Projects, lab sessions, tutorials are the common elements in most engineering courses. Organizing these activities is another administrative task to be accomplished. This requires synchronization of these tasks with the course contents and class in progress. Finding, assigning, assessing projects requires lots of efforts. The issues arise in finding or designing large number of similar natured projects with almost similar cognitive load.

3 Results from an Informal Survey

An informal survey of students, CS faculty and senior administration at IIIT Hyderabad highlighted many aspects of large classes.

3.1 Administration’s ViewThe administration is of the view that the main reason behind large classes is shortage of faculty. Institutes are not left with many options to handle this situation. Novice teachers can be hired, but they may seriously impact the quality of learning and the academic culture of an institute. The lesser evil option is to conduct large classes, where a senior faculty with experience in teaching and applications teaches the class with help of support staff such as teaching assistants. Technology can play a major role in efficient and effective conduct of such courses. This approach is feasible only for first level

courses, which are focused on lower levels of cognitive goals such as understanding and may be application. But the large classes should be an absolute no for advanced courses, where the learning objectives may include higher order cognitive skills or problem solving. In such courses quality can be maintained in small classes and all decisions should be left on the faculty, while providing all administrative support.

3.2 Faculty’s ViewSenior faculty was interviewed and following points were highlighted in the interviews:

Most issues are administrative in nature with grading being a major issue

Most faculty considers large classes as necessary evil and most believe that major issues are related to administration and not the pedagogy, especially in first level courses. But for advanced courses, large classes should be a NO.

Faculty uses same methods in large or small classes to invoke discussions, engaging students and ensuring that everyone learns.

Personalized learning is a concern for most faculty, though they do not recognize it by the ‘name’. Most are concerned about not knowing students in large classes.

A problem solving approach is a common strategy to keep classes interesting. Worked out and real world examples, analogies and carefully drafted assignments are tools to keep student interested, motivate them and invoke discussion.

Effective use of TAs helps to manage the issues, especially the administrative ones. But the pre-requisite is careful selection of these teaching assistants along with coordination and communication among all involved.

There are some unresolved issues such as plagiarism that require deeper discussion, change in student outlook and measures.

3.3 Students’ ViewWe randomly picked students from CSE courses and asked for their views about large classrooms. They were not given any cues and were asked to candidly air their views. This exercise validated most fears of the faculty, and indicated that large classes can become serious problem unless handled promptly and in a structured manner.

“In my opinion large classes hardly have any advantages. 1. With the population of a class extending more than 40-50 students, later the class tends to serve more of attendance purpose and less of learning. 2. The students, though not all, find it bit tough to raise their doubts in front of the large crowd.3. It becomes a pretty impossible for the teacher to attend the doubts of all students thus leading to unavailability of the teacher to few.4. As seen by me, very few professors' frequency of voice is suitable for the mikes, otherwise mostly either the professor is not audible or can't be clearly heard.5. Beyond the first few (4-5) rows, the students lose their interest in the topic covered in the class and result in more noise and have the tendency to cause disturbances.

6. As the student strength is too much it is impossible for any TA and even the professor to check plagiarism, thus leading to non-fulfillment of the purpose of assignments. In case of no feedback provided and intimated about wrong approach, students might follow the wrong approach. Thus thereby degrades the quality of the course as efficient and correct learnability of all can't be assured.The only advantage in large classes I feel is the varied interests of students studying together, few of whom might give some deep insights in the concepts involved in the course, thus making that knowledge available to all. (However a class strength of 40 takes care of this issue.)”

- A Student from 3rd year B. Tech (CS)  

Another student said that teacher’s experience in managing large classes is more important than any other thing. An excerpt from his interview:

“With a small classroom and less number of students attending a lecture, the main factor that determines the effectiveness of teaching is level of knowledge of the instructor, although other factors like student-teacher interaction and continuous evaluation can't be overlooked, but their significance increases with the increase in class room size. The effectiveness of a lecture in a large classroom depends on the instructor's communication abilities to a large extent. ….

… In the end, it all depends on the instructor's aptitude. In my opinion, a distinguished instructor may not do significantly better than an arbitrary instructor in a small classroom. But for handling large classrooms, I feel this requires some experience.”

2nd Student from 3rd year B. Tech (CS)

Following feedback shows the importance of personalization in class

“"Its definitely a bit more demanding to attend larger classes. Especially if the topic being taught is not of particular interest. If the class is smaller, we somehow manage to have better focus, which eventually may even result in gaining interest in some part of the subject. But in a large class, small distractions around you tend to weigh heavy on the mind. 

Also, less probability of being caught adds fuel to fire. On the other hand, even if I have an interest in the class, the less amount of eye contact with the professor, which is inevitable, makes it harder to appreciate the nuances of the subject. Also, I feel most of the courses having large classes tend to force the professors to resort to slides. Thus there is less of writing board involved which I find much more useful to me than slides. One more thing, there are less number of practical problems solved at individual level in a large class. Obviously, to mitigate reduced personal attention per student, the professor taking rounds of the class does help a lot but still isn't the same. Overall, given a choice I would definitely prefer a smaller class, but then, who wouldn't."  “

3rd Student from B. Tech (CS)

4 Solutions StrategiesA quick analysis of the issues and challenges suggests that learning related challenges are similar to those observed in small classrooms. The issues are closely associated with each other. The administrative and learning issues are not mutually exclusive. Modalities of pedagogical approaches suitable for large classes give rise to many administrative issues that require meticulous design of the learning environment. Just changing the pedagogy will not be useful; neither will be an isolated management of administrative issues.

In order to maintain the quality of learning, both types need to be addressed effectively and efficiently.

In this section we will discuss the strategies proven to be useful in large classrooms. For each strategy, we will discuss the general idea and how it addresses one or more challenges and issues identified earlier and then suggest current best practices or implementation of these strategies for large classrooms.

4.1 Modified pedagogiesConventional lectures are the most commonly used pedagogical approaches. But as discussed above, they are not very useful in the traditional form and require modifications to make the learning more active, reflective and collaborative. The idea is to move towards student-centered approach but with the control and structure offered by teacher centered approaches. Note that modifications will require greater preparation, more control and hence more effort and resources as compared to conventional lectures. The organization and administration should be well defined and clear to students and support staff. Common modifications that can be done are:

4.1.1 Lectures with active learning

The students must be engaged in some activity that forces them to think about and comment on the information presented in the lecture. Some of the current practices are:

Breaking up the conventional lecture with questions and discussion

Solving a small practical problem that requires application of concepts taught in class

Quiz on material from previous class

Asking students to consolidate the learning at end of the class

In-class exercises that may require working in pairs

Lecture with pauses, where the pauses are utilized by students to consolidate thoughts or make notes

4.1.2 Collaborative Learning

Mostly exhibited in form of group-based learning. Collaborative learning brings greater understanding along with the added learning of soft skills such as communication and teamwork. Group work can be easily modified to make classes interactive by combining discussion with group work. The tasks assigned to the groups can be tailored to

incorporate cognitive skills at all levels. The ways group work can be incorporated in large classrooms successfully include:

Temporary groups in class: Divide students into groups (3-4, or more depending on class size and problem to be solved). Groups answer specific questions or solve specific problems. These groups work on the solution and a group representative/spokesperson may report on the progress, once the larger class reconvenes. Some or all groups can present their solutions. A general sense of the class’s understanding can be gained by quickly polling several groups for their questions or comments.

Semester wide group work: Students can be divided into groups at the beginning of the semester. Specific group projects can be assigned that require groups to meet outside of class. Groups might be responsible for starting discussion, for presenting important concepts, or reporting on research. Discussion can be generated in class by asking the groups to present their diverse solutions, asking peers to comment on it, or by asking groups to abide to a specific position and present their views.

Group work on case studies and roleplaying are other effective mechanisms involving both active and collaborative learning.

Collaborative work requires that the tasks at hand be carefully designed such that they are in sync with the lectures and actually support the learning objectives of the course. Contextualized, real world problems can be given to students to create opportunities for authentic learning, thus incorporating aspects of Project Based Learning (PrBL) in collaborative learning. A major issue with introduction of collaborative work is assessment. Group work significantly reduced grading load, but introduces some newer challenges in assessment. Assessment of individual competency in a group is not easy and requires very careful design. Another issue may be to ensure contribution by all group members.

4.2 Engaging studentsKeeping students engaged is not easy, whether it is a small class or a large one. Keeping large number of students engaged is definitely challenging. Some successful strategies for engagement are:

Asking questions to students. Questions keep students focused. Students can be pointed out to ensure that even the shy students speak up. The questions can theoretical, or may require solving a problem. Straightforward questions on a topic can be used to evaluate if students have understood the topic or not. Indirect questions related to real world application of concepts, or asking even wrong questions can engage students.

Encouraging students to ask questions. For this they should create situations where students can ask questions. Motivate students to speak up.

Making classes discussion oriented is another way to engage students. The associate challenge is how to invoke discussions. The strategies for the same are given in forthcoming section.

Ask students to volunteer for a demonstration. These are not only engaging, but also interactive.

Give weight to class participation in grading. The participation can be in form of asking or answering questions, taking part in meaningful discussions, giving demonstrations on board etc.

Small in-class exercises, individual or pair wise are also effective ways of engaging students.

A good strategy to keep students attentive is to moving around in class instead of standing in front all the time. This creates an environment akin to a small class and makes faculty approachable.

Collaborative, active learning as discussed in previous section.

4.3 Using discussionsOwing to the diversity inherent in large classrooms, discussions can prove to be very effective learning tools in large class settings. They can bring varied viewpoints to the class room, and help in inculcating higher order thinking skills. Following techniques can be used for invoking discussions in any class, especially a large class.

Discussions can be centered on project work, or a in class exercises.

Case exercises provide unique opportunities for discussion, since they are involve ill structured or semi-structured problem solving. There is no single right solution for such problems and hence they generate discussions very easily.

The discussions can be easily centered on application of a concept, applicability of a concept or procedure, or comparison of methods and techniques. Students can be asked (randomly or chosen) to present their results from group work and the peers can be asked to give comments, critiques or alternatives to presented solutions.

Include participation in discussions as part of class participation. Give weight to class participation in grading

Ask questions related to boundary condition. This makes student think and ask questions.

Ask very difficult or wrong questions in class. This will again force students to think or at least speak up.

4.4 Motivating the uninterestedImpersonalized environments of large classes can easily make the students beyond first few rows less attentive or slowly loose interest in the topic. It is best to avoid such situations by keeping classes engaging and interactive. If somehow the student is still lost, then following strategies can be useful to motivate students in the subject. Motivation will automatically bring attention and engagement.

Problem solving mode. Starting with a problem and showing how the learning from the class can be applied to solve a given problem or a set of problems. The

demonstration can be in the beginning, middle or end of the class. The problems should be authentic, sufficiently complex and useful. When students understand ‘why’ behind a concept, they get motivated for deeper learning.

Carefully drafted examinations. Assessments are a big motivator. Application oriented exams, where students have to demonstrate proficiency in application of concepts or procedures learned in class can really motivate students to learn the material well.

Building analogies with real world phenomenon, or events. When students can see the connections between theory and reality, they get motivated to learn.

Give prompt feedback. A common reason for student loosing interest is lack of feedback after evaluations. When students cannot see their progress, they can easily get demotivated. Early and detailed feedback encourages students.

4.5 Personalization of LearningCreating an illusion of a small class is necessary to avoid impersonalized atmosphere commonly seen in large classrooms. Useful strategies are:

Learn at least some student names. Correct pronunciation of names is important especially when foreign students or difficult sounding names are present.

Move around in class and maintain eye contact

Distribute or collect papers/ material along with TAs.

Provide personalized feedbacks on the assessments. For this only a subset of students can be given feedback on one assessment. By semester end, most students would have received personalized feedback on one or more assessments.

Spend some time in clarifying doubts of students in class or off line.

Provide feedback mechanisms. Websites, course portals and emails are quick and useful mechanism for gathering feedback.

4.6 Careful course organization and implementationEstablishing Large classes require more organization and more preparation for proper administration of large classes. The course structure and other modalities should be decided in very beginning and discussed with the students and support staff. Some things to be taken care of are as follows:

Establish ground rules for communication, dealing with plagiarism, assessment policies etc. Communicate these details along with details of course learning objectives, assessment plans, study material, resources, etc.

Set expectations from the students and communicate these expectations to them at the very beginning of the course.

Establish a chain of command if TAs are involved.

Perform work distribution in the very beginning.

Conduct regular TA meetings.

Conduct regular lab /tutorial sessions/ TA office hours

4.7 Developing valid and reliable assessment that is also manageable. Useful learning environments require creation of meaningful assessments that satisfy the Learning sciences. Good assessments are aligned with the course learning goals, integrated with the pedagogy and are not a burden on the faculty and students. Further the assessment should provide feedback as well enhance learning opportunities to students. They should cover breadth as well depth of the curriculum. In large classes, the need for manageable assessment is high priority due to limited resources and time. Assessments can be objective type or subjective type. Objective type questions are easy to administer and grade, but can give incomplete picture of student’s competency. Following strategies help to develop good assessments:

Cover depth as well breadth of curriculum

Develop exams that demonstrate competency. Application type questions are useful to evaluate the competency levels of a student. Short essay type questions, case studies, are useful assessment instruments for this purpose. For large classes, these instruments can be used in combination with multiple-choice questions.

Add short essay questions; control the length of responses by providing students with a limited amount of space for answers. Thus students will write to the point answers.

Ask students to answer questions using diagrams or flow charts. These are short and easy to grade, but can be very informative about student analytical skills.

For some multiple-choice questions, ask the student to choose the correct answer and then provide a one- or two-line explanation of how they got that answer.

Give clear guidelines to students. Set expectations from the assessment and communicate them to the students. Similarly set guidelines for quality submissions by students and communicate them to the students.

Rely on multiple instruments of assessment instead of just one exam or one type of questions.

Inform students about the plagiarism policy.

Include questions that support reflection. Example: Reflect on the learning from this course and list top two learning from solutions given by group X.

4.8 Effective Grading mechanisms Use peer evaluations. Distribute an answer sheet so students can assess their own

performance, or set aside class time to go through the answers to the homework with the entire class. Students can do a self-assessment or a peer assessment using the provided answer sheet. Objective type questions can be very easily graded in class like this. A big advantage is that the feedback in instantaneous.

Use group assignments, thus substantially reducing the number of items to be graded.

Take help from technology to store, sort, organize answer sheets/documents. Submissions in digital format will allow for easier work distribution and feedback.

Assessment criteria of various exams and assignments should be shared with students. This will allow students to self evaluate and also cut off feedbacks and assessment related communication.

4.9 Dealing with PlagiarismCheating and plagiarism can easily spiral into a unmanageable problem if not curbed early and harshly in large class rooms. These problems are common when there are uninterested students in the class, or assessments are not set at the right level. There is no best way to deal with these issues. Some strategies that have helped us to some extent are as follows:

Place safeguards in place. Train TAs to detect cheating. Use software tools that can detect plagiarism.

Educate students about the vices and consequences of cheating and plagiarism. Emphasize on consequences.

Strict evaluation of very first assessments and penalties for the plagiarism or cheating cases will set the precedence.

Make submissions public (but not the marks). Project reports, group submissions, best answers etc. can be made publically available.

Encourage and if possible reward early submissions. Plagiarism increases when students try to make last minute submissions.

Set up tutorial sessions to help weak students.

4.10 Attendance takingFollowing strategies can be adopted to take attendance in a large class:

Fixed seating arrangements: Fixed seats can be assigned to students. Arrangement is usually alphabetical or by rolls code.  Students sit on the designated seats. Attendance taking may be reduced to marking of empty seats, thus absent students.  Even this activity can be delegated to a TA during the class.

Randomized attendance: This sub-optimal strategy requires that the faculty randomly calls names

Using in-class exercises or quizzes to mark attendance.  This eliminates the need to take separate attendance.

4.11 Using technologyAdministrators prefer to use technology to offset the lack of resources or to support administration of large classes. Some simple but effective uses are:

Lecture slides and notes: These can be shared electronically in class and off class. But they should be used as pointers for the faculty rather than content dissemination media. The slides can be PowerPoint slides or PDF documents.

Simulations. These interactive examples that exhibit a phenomenon or concept in working definitely engages students.

Public addressing system. A good microphone and speaker system goes a long way in keeping students interested. Inaudible faculty in a large class is a common problem. It keeps the stress off the faculty and they can focus on the content.

Learning Management systems/course portals. Extensive use of the course website e.g. availability of the entire course material, broadcasts related to the program, online assignment submissions and student discussion forums. This not only helps us reduce the quantity of direct communication but also motivates and engages the students in participating.

Automated or semi-automated grading systems

5 An experience ReportWe regularly teach a first course in Software Engineering to Computer Science students. Usual enrollment in the course is between 150 to 200 students. These students are a mix of under-graduate and full-time and part-time post-graduate students. The part-time students are industry participants with at least two years of software development experience. Sometimes we have students from other countries though the number is small. Thus we have a very diverse set of students. The learning goals of this course included: Thus learning outcomes for this Software Engineering course are:

Understanding the nature of software, software development and professionalism in software development

Inculcate the ability of engineering good software – through concepts, procedures, tools and techniques

Inculcating and practicing some problem solving skills such as forming hypothesis, analysis, critical thinking and evaluation. These skills form an important part of the enduring engineering principles in any engineering course

Other skills such as communication and teamwork.

We designed a scalable learning environment that is flexible enough to incorporate large number of students. This is an active and collaborative learning pedagogy based course. Non-conventional lectures and teaching case studies are the main teaching instruments.

Following table will list the strategies used in the course to handle the issues and challenges arising due to large number of students. We usually employ one (1) TA per

20 students and a lot of support from technology, since the use of case method is resource intensive.

This structured learning environment helped us in course administration in an effective and efficient manner.

Issue/ Challenge Technique used

Pedagogy

Lecture modified to incorporate active learning, group work to solve authentic case challenges and discussions on case solutions. Involves reflective learning. Students reflect on their learning from discussions and submit as part of assignments. Mixed groups of UG, PG and industry students are formed.

Invoking interest and engagement

Using real world case studies. The case studies were developed from actual software development projects and converted to teaching cases. Examples given in lectures. Worked out examples in theory lectures. Role plays. Class participation has 10% grading weight. Students encouraged to speak up during discussions and lectures. Same mode of instruction and assessment i.e. case studies. Hence students pay attention so that they can perform well in exams. Multiple teams solving same case. They usually give different solutions. All discussed in class.

Assessment

Using case studies as assessments. Realistic problems. Small essay type questions. Scope for justifying answers. Not looking for one right answer, instead many correctly justified answers. Application oriented exams. Online submission of assignments.

Communication

Course management portal used to disseminate course related information. Discussion forum, emails main medium of communication. Fixed formats for file uploads. All protocols discussed in the first lecture.

Feedback

Surveys conducted regularly. Mandatory course and case study feedbacks. Possibility of anonymous feedback. Detailed feedback by TAs on case study solutions before in class presentation and discussion. Sharing grading criteria with students.

PlagiarismTAs trained to detect plagiarism. ‘F grade’ if cheating. Case submissions posted on local wiki and accessible to all.

Issue/ Challenge Technique used

Practical activitiesRegular lab sessions on UML. Some Lab exercises considered as bonus submissions.

PersonalizationTAs or faculty meets each group and discuss the solution with student groups. Opportunity for doubt clearing, removal of misconceptions. Movement and eye contact in class.

Attendance Fixed seating. Noting absentees

DisciplineQuestions and focused discussion is allowed, noise is not. Attendance in beginning of class to avoid late-comers.

Course organizations

Well-defined expectations, large number of carefully chosen TAs, Ground rules for communication, dealing with plagiarism, assessment policies, reporting etc. Regular TA meetings.

Table 1: Summary of Decisions related to Class Size for Software Engineering Class

6 ConclusionsEnabling large classes to impart quality education is a challenging task. Introducing a variation in size changes the entire dynamics of a class. Size brings variations, administrative issues and need for pedagogical changes with it. Basic learning principles and guidelines for effective teaching remain the same, the implementation of these practice changes significantly. Most issues are a mix of inter-dependent administrative and pedagogical issues that require careful design and operationalization of this learning environment. The administrative issues cannot be ignored of the students in large classes are to be engaged in a quality learning experience. We discussed several issues and the possible best practices that may help faculty and students to make large classes a rewarding experience.

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