'Supersizing' the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2,670 Students | Hacker News Reader

'Supersizing' the College Classroom: How One Instructor Teaches 2,670 Students

chronicle.com

32 pointsilamont12 comments

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.

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.

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

"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...

and

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

"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.

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...

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.

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

Why not? Most students will have the same questions, which can be turned into a FAQ live and the teacher will still be able to dedicate some time and attention individually...

There are trade offs involved. When you scale the size of the classroom, not all other things are the same.

What if you minimize expenses? Classes 10x larger, tuition 5x smaller?

What if instead of getting an average professor teaching 30 students, you get an absolutely great one teaching 1000?

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?

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.

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