When class sizes are so big you can do the stadium wave, barriers to teaching and learning arise: students can feel invisible, and instructors may struggle to engage the entire class — or even most of it. Lately, the problem of connecting in classes with high teacher-to-student ratios has been compounded by the stampede to remote education. Students who might have been blurred faces in a crowded room could be even more invisible online. Whether classes are delivered online or not, we have an opportunity — even an obligation — to reach every student. Beyond the lecture halls and video calls, we can use digital tools to engage everyone in social learning.
In “Pedagogical Choices Make Large Classes Feel Small,” a National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment study, authors Karen Singer-Freeman and Linda Bastone discuss the ways large classrooms can be barriers to student success. They describe how dropout rates can rise as a result, especially for first-year students — who are most likely to be in big intro classes — and vulnerable members of the student population. Singer-Freeman and Bastone recommend breaking students into groups as a basic strategy to build community in large classes.
More and more educators are seeing the deep pedagogical value in collaborative annotation as a social-learning practice, but it doesn’t always work to have hundreds of students annotating the same text. At Hypothesis, the No. 1 request we’ve gotten from teachers has been to have a way to segment large classes. We listened, and we created a solution: new functionality that works with the Canvas LMS to break large classes into sections. This feature can be deployed by the instructor or automated by the LMS.
