

'Supersizing' the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2,670 Students - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/article/How-One-Instructor-Teaches/131656/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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Stwerner
I actually had Boyer for Geography of Wine - another popular class of his
(never won the lottery to get into World Regions when I was there). He was
definitely one of the few professors I had that through his personality and
unique style was able to make learning something dry like memorizing different
regions, styles, and attributes of wine an absolute blast. It is great to see
him start to get a lot of recognition, I just wish I could be there in World
Regions now.

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shawnee_
_Other recent guests have included Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen, whose
recent movie focuses on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain, and
Jason Russell, creator of "Kony 2012," a viral video about the brutal Ugandan
rebel leader Joseph Kony.

"I'm not sure any of these things would have occurred without a class of 3,000
people," says Mr. Boyer, a senior instructor. "I totally can now foresee that
this time next year we're going to get Barack Obama in the classroom, if not
live, via Skype._

It is a bit surpising that it has taken this long for such ideas about scaling
in the classroom to really get mainstream attention. Population growth is an
exponential function, so the sooner we can figure out how to efficiently adapt
to the needs of large classes, the better.

~~~
robrenaud
If population growth is exponential, and the same proportion of students and
teachers are produced from the population, you have no need to scale.

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tokenadult
"Conventional wisdom deems smaller classes superior. Mr. Boyer, a self-
described 'Podunk instructor,' calls that 'poppycock.'"

In the West and in the East, there has always been wisdom contrary to the
conventional wisdom that small class sizes are always better. Indeed, the
Roman author Quintilian, writing about rhetoric, derided teachers who insisted
on small class sizes. In Quintilian's view, the true test of a teacher was
being able to engage and enlighten a large class. Quintilian described
teachers who could only handle small class sizes as no better than baby-
sitting slaves. He wrote, "all good teachers like a large class and think they
deserve a bigger stage" while it is the "weaker teachers, conscious of their
own defects, who cling to individual pupils and seem content" (Book I of his
Institutio Oratoria).

<http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Quintilian.html>

East Asian schools, which are still plainly superior to those of the United
States in the view of informed observers,

<http://educationnext.org/the-common-core-math-standards/>

have characteristically large class sizes, the better to ensure that teachers
are more stringently selected and that they have work hours during the school
day to confer with master teachers of their subject. More details of how
schools are organized in some of the conspicuously successful countries can be
found in

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-
Education/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Teaching-Gap-Improving-
Education/dp/0684852748)

and

[http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-
Mathematic...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-
Understanding/dp/0415873843/)

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jakeonthemove
"Conventional wisdom deems smaller classes superior"... Well that doesn't
really apply in this case, does it? You can have 3000 students sitting in
their own comfortable place, all learning from you.

The Internet revolutionized the way we learn. I remember wanting to learn how
to create a small tripwire alarm circuit when I was a kid and having to go
through half a dozen books from the library and make my own notes before
putting it all together (it took several days). If I had access to the
Internet as it is nowadays - I'd be able to start (and probably finish) the
actual work in hours!

I hope this develops further - it definitely has the potential to make college
and universities useless. The downside is that you don't learn how to work and
socialize with other people - that's why I believe that online (and home-)
schooling is not a good replacement for elementary and secondary education...
not yet, at least.

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yardie
This is one of those classes that benefits from having a large following. I
took it when it wasn't so large (100s not 1000s). The material is easy to
follow (who doesn't like world trivia?) and the flow of guest speakers keeps
it interesting.

On the other hand, I can't see a discrete math course, for example, working
the same way. Sometimes you need the intimate interaction that only a 10
student class can provide. I also took a 5 person lecture once, talk about
nowhere to hide...

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RollAHardSix
So you end up with the same educational value as a super-sized meal's
nutritional value. Letting students pick what they want to learn? Take your
Montessori-style back and give me rigidity and structure (Only half-kidding on
that part). Without even a final exam to test what was learned over the course
of ~3 months; it's hard to put any stock in students learning anything.

Instead I recreate a scene from my college days; sitting on a couch watching
while Michael and his girlfriend Jesi were working on two different laptops to
tackle ~4 Philosophy quizzes in the space of about an hour. One to click
answers. One to google.

...One to control them all. /AwesomeReferenceThrownInForAwesomeness.

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eli_gottlieb
Why would we _want_ to supersize the college classroom? From a student's
perspective, smaller classes are a better experience.

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potatolicious
If your average college lecture was an interactive experience, sure, smaller
sizes are better. I don't know about you, but that's decidedly _not_ how my
college lectures were - it's the prof talking down to a room full of people
madly scribbling.

So in that context, since the experience is entirely one-sided, why _not_
scale it up?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_If your average college lecture was an interactive experience, sure, smaller
sizes are better. I don't know about you, but that's decidedly not how my
college lectures were - it's the prof talking down to a room full of people
madly scribbling._

Which means you had an inferior college experience.

For us, lectures consisted of about 25-50 people after the introductory
courses. Even the non-intro weed-out courses had small sections. Larger
sections were used to have a better, more specialized professor teach more
people due to lack of another equally-qualified professor, as necessary.

Small sections allow for more discussions, more curricula shifts to cover
additional subjects, more honors colloquia for dedicated students, etc.

