Tools and Resources

The Daily Nous, "News for and about the philosophy profession" shares slides from a professor Andrew Mills at Otterbein University that summarizes the research about how computers and phones in class affect student performance. Prof. Mills has made his slides available to other faculty. Might they be adapted into an activity where students predict the research and see the results in slides using the Assertion Evidence model?

An online module designed to help you work more efficiently with student teams within your classes. This module is designed to help you work with teams in both face-to-face and online courses. Regardless of what type of course you teach, you should find helpful information within this course regarding the formation, facilitation and performance of student teams.

A low-tech alternative to clickers, Western Washington University's ABCD Cards app can be used in an educational setting as an alternative to paper ABCD card method for formative assessments and in-class active learning activities. The simple interface provides students with a paper-free way to easily display an answer to an instructor's question and for the instructor to quickly look across the room for the general consensus of answers.

A low-tech alternative to clickers, Western Washington University's ABCD Cards app can be used in an educational setting as an alternative to paper ABCD card method for formative assessments and in-class active learning activities. The simple interface provides students with a paper-free way to easily display an answer to an instructor's question and for the instructor to quickly look across the room for the general consensus of answers.

The Center for Teaching Excellence at Boston College provides this resource to help instructors decide whether and when to talk about the election in the post-election period. It outlines factors you might want to consider as you plan your responses and a few different paths you could take in your response. While students appreciate when instructors respond in some way to upheavals in the wider world, you do have options. When deciding how to talk about the election, it can be helpful to bear in mind your own goals for teaching and learning, the fact that major events can be distracting and make it more difficult to teach and learn, and that students in your class may have differing perceptions of what is at stake in the election in light of their own histories and identities.

Teaching Large Classes by Adam Wilsman, Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University
Teaching a large class poses many challenges, both in and out of the classroom. In the classroom, large enrollments can promote student disengagement and feelings of alienation, which can erode students’ sense of responsibility and lead to behaviors that both reflect and promote lack of engagement. Logistics can also be a challenge when teaching a large class. How does one best manage the daily administration of what can often feel like a small city? This resource presents strategies to help instructors deal with some of the challenges associated with teaching large classes.

In this article, Meixun Sinky Zheng, PhD, shares some low-risk strategies to help faculty transform lectures into student-centered learning experiences for enhanced learning outcomes. These active learning strategies can be easily implemented without significant redesign of the class and without an investment in technology. The article ends with a few tech-based strategies for engaging your students.

Tips for Teaching Large Classes Online, Faculty Focus, Rob Kelly (3-17-2009) writes about strategies used by Jonathan Mathews, Professor of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State. Prof. Mathews still regularly teaches large enrollment online courses.

This FAQ about effective teaching and learning in large courses (large classes) from the Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation. The questions focus on reducing anonymity, managing and engaging students, active learning, checking for learning, incorporating writing and group work without overwhelming yourself.

From UC Berkeley's Center for Teaching and Learning, Considerations for Large Lecture Classes provides six ways to make lectures in a large enrollment course more manageable and effective. The strategies include communicating explicit learning expectations, not trying to "cover" everything, focusing on analysis of issues or problems, engaging students through active learning practices, providing feedback to students, and using clickers to poll students.

This article from UC Berkeley's' Center for Teaching & Learning, reviews how to create opportunities for your students to build deeper understanding of concepts through articulation and elaboration, as they engage in learning conversations (discourse & sensemaking) in a large lecture hall. These strategies shift some of the intellectual work to the students, as they offer explanations, summaries, elaborations, articulations of the material, and find ways to connect to what they already know with what they are learning in your course (Allen & Tanner, 2005). The title of the article is "Discourse & Sensemaking Strategies in Large Lecture."

Allen, D., & Tanner, K. (2005). Infusing active learning into the large-enrollment biology class: Seven strategies, from the simple to complex. Cell Biology Education (CBE), 4, 262-268. doi:10.1187/cbe.05-08-0113

This article is written by one of the most well-known professors in engineering education, Richard Felder. While not new, is still relevant to instructors teaching large courses. Felder says: "When we find ourselves teaching a mob, it's easy to throw up our hands, conclude that there's no chance of getting any responsiveness out of 150 or 300 students in an auditorium... Fortunately, there are ways to make large classes almost as effective as their smaller counterparts. Without turning yourself inside out, you can get students actively involved, help them develop a sense of community, and give frequent homework assignments without killing yourself (or your teaching assistants) with impossible grading loads. BEATING THE NUMBERS GAME: EFFECTIVE TEACHING IN LARGE CLASSES, by Richard M. Felder, Department of Chemical Engineering
North Carolina State University. Presented at the 1997 ASEE Annual Conference, Milwaukee, WI, June 1997.

We include this article in our repository to demonstrate that faculty have been concerned about and practicing active learning in large courses for decades. This is a classic from 1987 by Peter Frederick in a volume edited by well-known champion of excellent teaching and Prof. Emerita at Penn State, Maryellen Weimer. Teaching Large Classes Well. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 32: 45-56. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Frederick discusses interactive lectures, using questions to involve the class, asking specific questions (rather than "does everyone understand? which no one wants to answer), using small groups, using problem-solving to foster critical thinking, debates, simulations, and role playing. While his examples might be a bit dated, this still makes a lot of sense and provides useful ideas to adapt for the 21st century.

For most teachers, leading classroom discussion on difficult topics is a perennial challenge. Part of the challenge lies in the fact that we never fully know which issues will be “hot buttons” for our students. Conversations can become heated very quickly, and before long, it can feel like the class is careening out of control. This guide seeks to help teachers feel more confident leading difficult dialogues by encouraging reflection on how such discussions connect with larger learning goals, and by providing specific strategies and resources that teachers can use to create more productive conversations in their classrooms.

Face-to-face, online and hybrid courses all have the same credit hour requirements for students. How can faculty know if they are assigning a workload that is too heavy or too light? How can faculty set expectations for student time on task? How can faculty answer students questions about "how long with this assignment take?" This website provides guidelines to help estimate student activity times--with the caveat that hours are not a measure of learning.

This site provides faculty, instructional designers, and faculty developers with general estimates of student time needed for learning. These estimates are particularly important in online and blended courses where students often under estimate the amount of time needed to learn, and where faculty also frequently ask “is there too much/not enough?” in the course. Faculty are the ultimate decision-makers in determining their course’s alignment to credit hour requirements and in making estimations about the amount of time students spend “in” and “out” of class for blended courses or engaged in learning activities for online courses.

This is a recorded webinar presented by James M. Lang at University Park on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2020. As faculty struggle with the problem of distracted students on our campuses and in our classes, they have become increasingly frustrated by the ways in which digital devices can interfere with student learning. But are students today more distracted than they were in the past? Has technology reduced their ability to focus and think deeply, as some popular books have argued? This interactive lecture draws upon scholarship from history, neuroscience, and education in order to provide productive new pathways for faculty to understand the distractible nature of the human brain, work with students to moderate the effects of distraction in their learning, and even leverage the distractible nature of our minds for new forms of connected and creative thinking.

This webinar was recorded by Penn State Libraries staff using Mediasite Live, and it is stored in the libraries' Mediasite catalog. The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence bears no responsibility for the quality of the recording, its maintenance, its availability, nor its functionality. For help with the recording, call (814) 865-5400 or send an email message to MediaTechSupport@psu.edu.

Teaching Squares give faculty an opportunity to gain new insight into their teaching through a non-evaluative process of reciprocal classroom observation and self-reflection. A square is made up of four faculty, typically from different disciplines. The four faculty in each “teaching square” agree to visit each other’s classes over the course of a semester and then meet to discuss what they’ve learned from their observations.