Re: Teaching in Large Classrooms

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley (in the late 1970s), there was an auditorium that held about 800 students. Some classes had television monitors in "satellite" classrooms.

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Hoover [mailto:HooverM@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 10:59 AM
> To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PEN-L] Teaching in Large Classrooms
> 
> 
> San Diego Union Tribune
> October 27, 2003
> 
> New SDSU classroom can seat 520 students
> 
> By Lisa Petrillo
> UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
> 
> The Ph.D. woman at center stage wore a head-set headset mike
> microphone
> like a pop star as she warmed up the standing-room-only crowd.
> 
> "Those in the back, if you can squint, you can see I'm not Britney
> Spears,"
> joked assistant professor Ronnee Schreiber.
> 
> Schreiber won a few giggles from the 500-plus students in her course,
> Introduction to Political Science, but most of them seemed a bit
> nervous
> about the design and sheer size of the largest and highest-tech
> classroom
> in San Diego State history.
> 
> At nearly 20 times the size of a typical classroom, this one is
> college
> gone supersize.
> 
> The converted gymnasium is a $520,000 investment that attempts to make
> lemonade out of the budget cutbacks that have rocked California and
> its
> higher education system over the past two years.
> 
> This single room will enable roughly a dozen SDSU faculty members, in
> just
> one semester, to teach nearly 7,000 students.
> 
> Fittingly, two of the 13 classes meeting there this semester are
> Economics
> 101 and 102 * the classroom epitomizes the "economy of scale."
> 
> San Diego State officials hope the "smart-classroom" technology built
> into
> the big room helps compensate for its size.
> 
> "It's very exciting, the possibilities," said Dave Sharpe of SDSU's
> instructional technology department.
> 
> Sharpe led the design team of engineers, faculty and art department
> representatives, whose contribution is clearly visible in the soothing
> blue
> tones on the walls, so colorful compared with the beige of most campus
> interiors.
> 
> Startling sizes
> 
> Everything about this room is different.
> 
> Professors work at an 8-foot-long control panel. Behind it are three
> giant
> movie screens, like those at sports stadiums to help those in the
> cheap
> seats see the action.
> 
> Spotlights, speakers, microphones and small digital cameras hang from
> a
> metal grid in the ceiling, giving the place the look of a trendy
> nightspot.
> 
> Certainly large classrooms are nothing new here or at major
> universities
> nationwide. San Diego State has four 200-and 300-seat rooms. There's
> even
> an academic phrase for big classrooms: lecture halls.
> 
> But a 520-desk classroom brings large to a whole new level.
> 
> What is also new is the sea change in educational philosophy and
> practice
> at San Diego State, where professors, not grad students, traditionally
> have
> done the majority of instruction.
> 
> The mega-classrooms have been the province of the large,
> research-oriented
> universities to save money on instructors, said classroom-design
> expert
> Ronald Baker, formerly of Purdue University.
> 
> "The argument is always presented in terms of: 'Just think, you'll be
> taught by the top researcher in his/her field. Naturally 
> you'll have to
> be
> in a 500-seat room to accommodate everybody, since there's only one of
> him/her and since there are only so many hours that he/she 
> can teach in
> a
> day," he said.
> 
> Baker loathes the warehouse designs of giant lecture halls. But he
> believes
> such big rooms, if done right, can be effective places to learn,
> "given
> that these giant classrooms are here to stay."
> 
> "All the electronic stuff * like individual laptops for each kid,
> large-screen video images that you can actually read in the back of
> the
> room and sound systems that really let you hear what the professor is
> saying * these are all benefits," Baker said.
> 
> The San Diego State classroom does not come equipped with individual
> laptops.
> 
> Not only is San Diego State's big room probably here to stay, it's
> being
> copied. Officials plan to open a second smart classroom in the spring.
> 
> Building challenge
> 
> To create its big classroom, SDSU used one of its oldest buildings, an
> architectural gem built by the Works Progress Administration that now
> houses the department of exercise and nutrition sciences.
> 
> Designing the big room was a challenge for Tony Fulton, facilities
> planning
> chief. Despite the hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide
> pumping
> millions into creating smart classrooms, Fulton discovered that the
> idea
> was still so new that nobody really knew the best way to build them.
> 
> "I was surprised there wasn't a whole lot out there on 
> standards of the
> big
> classrooms," said Fulton. "Things like 'How do you handle sightlines?
> What
> about sound? How wide do you make the aisles?' "
> 
> One SDSU innovation has the room's theater-style chairs wired with
> palm-sized quasi-computers. The devices are used to communicate
> electronically via the Internet with the professor at the 
> console. They
> are
> limited to numerical responses, rather than text.
> 
> Equipping each seat with a text-capable personal digital assistant, or
> PDA,
> would have allowed students to communicate directly with instructors,
> but
> that would have been more costly.
> 
> Schreiber said the new toys gave her a chance to do what political
> scientists like best: take a poll. (Among the results, she found that
> 27
> percent of the students said they were Democrats, 23 percent said they
> were
> Republicans, 21 percent said they were not registered to vote.)
> 
> "It's a trade-off," Schreiber said of the big room. "I can introduce
> more
> students into politics this way and, for someone like me who is
> passionate
> about their subject, that's important. But I lose that intimacy and
> classroom interaction."
> 
> Schreiber and all the professors teaching in the big room volunteered,
> and
> the university provided them training. She also contacted other
> professors
> for advice * although, in truth, she said, "Being a teacher is
> intuitive.
> In the end you just have to do it."
> 
> New wave
> 
> Supersize learning is not for everyone.
> 
> "It's difficult for some students to stand up in front of 20 people,
> let
> alone 500. With some students it will be an issue," said Sharpe of
> SDSU's
> instructional technology department. Sharpe said the room's size could
> well
> change debate and inhibit students from asking questions.
> 
> Size is no problem for sophomore Paul Aguilar, who has two classes in
> the
> big blue room this fall. He took Seat 436 in Schreiber's political
> science
> class, near the back. The professor looked a lot smaller from there,
> some
> students joked, giving new meaning to the term "distance learning."
> 
> Aguilar shrugged, "It's all the same to me."
> 
> Some students prefer the bigger classrooms.
> 
> "I like the people," said junior Mercedes Martinez, who believes
> larger
> crowds add more energy to classes.
> 
> And, to be honest, students also appreciate the expansion of datable
> material a big room offers.
> 
> Then there are the new rules. The sheer size presents challenges to
> the
> traditional professor-student dynamic. How to take attendance? How to
> handle 520 quizzes? How do they even give quizzes and ensure that
> student
> in Seat 376 really was the one who took and signed it? How to test
> students
> in such close quarters over such a large expanse?
> 
> Big rooms allow for a slide factor that students like Nathan Newson
> adore.
> "I like them because they're easier," said Newson, an upperclassman
> majoring in communications and advertising. "There are no quizzes,
> they
> don't take roll. The profs usually teach right out of the textbook, so
> you
> don't even have to go to class."
> 
> University officials say class rules are up to individual professors.
> In
> Schreiber's case, she won't be using some of the traditional
> mechanisms
> that professors wield, such as pop quizzes, required attendance and
> the
> power of knowing who is who, so that misbehavior can be punished with
> the
> ultimate hammer, the final grade.
> 
> For those very reasons Schreiber got serious after her opening jokes,
> laying out her rules and expectations. Although there won't 
> be quizzes,
> she
> said, there will be research papers. And there will be tests given in
> the
> small-classroom lab sections taught by Schreiber's squad of
> graduate-student teaching assistants.
> 
> "I'm not a fish, but I can see what is going on," she warned. A few of
> the
> big guys in the back looked skeptical, although they straightened up
> ever
> so slightly.
>