2. Reinventing Large-Enrollment Courses

Contexts | Core Values | Case examples | Challenges and Recommendations

Contexts

Much of the teaching at Berkeley, particularly in the lower division, takes place and will continue to take place in the large-enrollment context. Large courses, enrolling 200 students or more, serve as gateway courses for the major, function as prerequisites for courses in other majors, and include many first-year and transfer students. In 2001-02, 172 courses enrolling 200 students or more were offered, representing three to four percent of all undergraduate primary courses. Seventy-six percent of those courses were taught by ladder-rank faculty, followed by lecturers/instructors (17%), visiting/adjunct faculty (3%), recall/emeriti faculty (2%), and other (2%). Although the percentage of large-enrollment courses relative to the total number of courses offered is small, the impact on students, particularly first-time students, is significant. In 2001-02, 98% of the entering freshmen class and 72% of entering transfer students took at least one large-enrollment course. On average in their first year, new freshmen took 4.3 and new transfers took 2.7 large enrollment courses. There are as many approaches to teaching such courses as there are Berkeley faculty; however, the vast majority have historically been taught using the lecture format. The traditional lecture will continue to be an important tool for the transmission of information; at the same time, many faculty are exploring alternatives and enhancements to the traditional delivery of instruction. A number of trends are currently prompting a rethinking of large-enrollment courses: institutional and demographic shifts; a body of scholarship on recasting such courses based on what we know about student learning (Gibbs, 1982; Gibbs & Jenkins, 1992; MacGregor et al., 2000; Weimer, 1987); and the availability of new technological tools that can serve pedagogical aims.

Throughout this decade, the University of California is facing significantly increasing enrollment—dubbed Tidal Wave II—in a context of budgetary shortfalls. The UC System is increasing enrollments by 63,000 over the period 1998-2011, with Berkeley being asked to accept 4,000 new FTE. Although the actual campus student-faculty ratio remains relatively stable at 16:1, the budgeted student-faculty ratio for the UC system was raised in the 1990s from 17.6:1 to 18.7:1. The budget climate in California has already resulted in discussions at the state level to increase the ratio further, which would only exacerbate the existing disparities between the campus and peer comparison private universities such as Yale, Princeton, and Stanford that have significantly lower ratios. As undergraduate enrollments expand, the number of qualified Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) who lead sections of large-enrollment courses is declining, due in part to an increased availability of nonteaching support to keep Berkeley competitive with other institutions. The current ratio of graduate students to undergraduates is 27% to 73%. In comparison, in 2001-02, UCLA had a ratio of 32% to 68%, while Harvard, Stanford, and MIT had significantly higher ratios of approximately 60% to 40%. Faculty have reported difficulty recruiting and retaining highly qualified GSIs, who staff over 2,000 sections each semester. As a result of these factors, accommodating expanded student enrollment will require creativity, resourcefulness, and innovation in the deployment of teaching resources.

In traditional lecture formats, instructors transmit knowledge and students receive information. Research indicates that this model may not always be the most effective way to promote student learning (Gibbs, 1982; Ramsden, 1992). Nationwide, a shift in pedagogy is under way towards what is variously characterized as active or participatory learning or learner-centered education (Weimer, 2002), which has been shown to be more effective in fostering critical thinking, collaborative work, and other key skills. Students who work in groups learn more, retain knowledge longer, and express greater levels of satisfaction than students working on their own (Bosworth & Hamilton, 1994; Goodsell et al., 1992; Johnson et al., 1991; Millis & Cottell, 1998). An increased emphasis on measuring student learning outcomes, triggered in part by an increased state and national demand for accountability, has accompanied this shift and has also led to increased dialogue and scholarship on the topic of assessment as evidenced by the American Association of Higher Education’s annual conference on assessment and work on classroom assessment (Angelo & Cross, 1993) and classroom research (Cross & Steadman, 1996).

The composition of Berkeley’s student body has also undergone change. Despite the impact of Proposition 209 on our numbers of underrepresented students, Berkeley’s students are becoming more diverse across a variety of dimensions, including cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic level, immigrant status, native language, and background, including preparation for Berkeley. Of Spring 2003 Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) respondents, about two thirds had at least one parent who was born outside the United States, and about half first learned either another language than English or learned English with another language. About a third had combined parental incomes of under $50,000. High schools and community colleges vary widely in their ability to prepare students for the rigors of the Berkeley academic experience. Many new students are on their own for the first time, and the large-enrollment format that students encounter in a majority of their first-year classes may exacerbate their feelings of isolation. For example, 61% of freshmen surveyed, as compared with 33% of graduating seniors, reported that during the current academic year they had “never” or “rarely” been in a class where the professor knew their name. Similarly, 61% of freshmen, as compared with 34% of graduating seniors, had “never” or “rarely” met with a faculty member in person, such as during office hours. It should be noted that the Freshman Seminar Program, which offers about 100 seminars per semester, is designed explicitly to counteract this isolation by giving small groups of freshmen an opportunity to interact closely with a faculty member. However, large-enrollment courses will continue to be a significant part of the first-year experience.

Improvements in large-enrollment courses may rest on creative uses of technology. Recognizing both the opportunities and the challenges inherent in using technology to enhance pedagogy, the campus initiated an innovative campus-wide dialogue on this topic. The e-Berkeley Symposium: Rethinking Large-Enrollment Courses, New Ideas for Teaching and Learning, which took place in Spring 2003, attracted 120 participants (half of whom were faculty; the rest were staff, administrators, GSIs, and undergraduates). It addressed such issues as developing new course models to build learning communities, assessing student learning, and using technology to minimize the administrative burden of large courses. The success of the symposium (which was featured on the system-wide UC Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center website) has led to calls for future dialogues on other teaching issues. As an outcome of the symposium, participants helped develop a set of recommendations, which informed this essay.

To understand how Berkeley faculty are recasting large-enrollment courses in response to the above trends, the Working Group identified a subset of courses for further investigation. These included courses that had received campus course improvement grants or other campus awards, and courses identified through an informal survey of department chairs conducted as part of the preparation for the e-Berkeley Symposium. In the remainder of this essay, we identify a set of core values derived from these investigations that can inform the delivery of large-enrollment courses, discuss several case examples that exemplify these values, and outline a set of challenges and recommendations that can help us reinvent the way large-enrollment courses are delivered in the future.

Core Values

The Working Group identified the following core values:

• Creating learning communities based on collaborative instruction, active pedagogies, or group projects and assignments.
• Promoting greater instructor-student and student-student interaction, both in the classroom and through the use of online enhancements to the learning environment.
• Increasing students’ information literacy, including the ability to recognize when information is needed and to acquire, evaluate, organize, maintain, interpret, and communicate the needed information.
• Encouraging multidisciplinary learning and engaging students in complex problems that draw on multiple fields.
• Developing research competencies that help students build transferable skills in inquiry and critical thinking that will prepare them for capstone experiences.
• Identifying learning objectives and incorporating into courses effective mechanisms for assessing student learning.
• Leveraging technology to increase the effectiveness of large-enrollment courses.
• Recasting the traditional role of the Graduate Student Instructor to improve pedagogical outcomes for undergraduates, strengthen mentorship of GSIs by faculty, and enhance GSI professional development.

Case Examples

We have identified four lower-division gateway courses to serve as case examples. The examples were selected to represent a range of disciplines and because they exemplify several of the campus’s core values, as illustrated in Table 1. They demonstrate a range of pedagogical models, including the traditional lecture format, which can be applied to enhance student learning.

Table 1: How case examples reflect our core values for innovative large-enrollment courses

Anthropology 2

Computer Science 3

History 7B

Physics 8A

Challenges

While each of the case studies reveals unique obstacles, there are some overarching challenges that work against rethinking the large-enrollment course:

• Faculty have limited time to make innovations in their courses, may not have knowledge about options, and may lack both awareness of and access to adequate pedagogical and technological support resources.
• Instructional technology is underutilized by faculty who may be unfamiliar with what is available or may be wary that it will minimize faculty-student contact.
• The traditional lecture/section format is firmly embedded in campus culture, and many faculty link their ability as teachers with their ability to deliver good lectures.
• A reliance on student course evaluations in assessing teaching contributions may work to penalize innovation and experimentation, since faculty who take risks with new methods may be reluctant to do so if one possible outcome is poor student ratings.
• Faculty like to design their own courses, so course innovations can be difficult to sustain over time when teaching assignments for key courses change.
• GSIs need preparation for the new and expanded roles required of them, resulting in a need for more time-consuming mentoring and training.
• Innovations, particularly technology enhancements, may require substantial startup time and significant financial investments.
• We lack campus-wide data about which courses should be targeted for improvement, and we have not developed adequate campus-wide assessment procedures to determine whether revised courses are successful in meeting our overall educational objectives.
• Large-enrollment courses do not always lend themselves to academic skills development, such as research and information literacy skills, needed for more advanced coursework.
• Classrooms are not appropriately configured to support new technologies and pedagogies.

Recommendations

1.  Provide incentives and recognition for instructors who experiment with new approaches to teaching large-enrollment courses. Strategies could include different approaches to measuring teaching workload; course improvement resources and incentives for faculty and departments; teaching awards for innovation and creativity in teaching large-enrollment courses; and recognition of teaching effectiveness and pedagogical innovation in the hiring, tenure, and promotion process.

Current Efforts: Psychology is one department that currently uses a point system for assessing faculty workload: large-enrollment courses are worth more points than seminars.

2.  Improve instructor development efforts targeted to large-enrollment courses. Approaches could include special ongoing workshops and forums for faculty, GSIs, and other instructors teaching large-enrollment courses; a website on large-enrollment courses with access to resources and information about effective practices; creation of mentoring and team-teaching relationships between seasoned and new faculty; better publicity and coordination of existing instructor development efforts; opportunities for peer observation and feedback; and the development of networks for instructors to communicate about pedagogy both within and across disciplines.

Current Efforts: The online resource Tools for Teaching includes tips on teaching large-enrollment courses. Educational Technology Services’ Profiles website disseminates faculty best practices and features the following model large-enrollment courses: Digital Chem 1A: Introductory Chemistry, IDS 110: Introduction to Computers; and WS 10: Introduction to Women’s Studies.

3.  Promote GSI development and effectiveness. Large-enrollment courses could be strengthened by enhancing the professional development of GSIs who teach sections through pedagogical training and mentoring that foster close working relationships with faculty and peers.

Current Efforts: The GSI Teaching and Resource Center offers an annual three-week Faculty Seminar on Teaching with GSIs and leads workshops for faculty on how to work effectively with GSIs addressing such topics as how to conduct a classroom observation, assisting GSIs in developing a teaching portfolio, and effective grading. The Center also sponsors the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs.

4.  Foster the creation of learning communities in large-enrollment courses. Strategies could include office hours that allow for small-group interaction, roles for undergraduates as teaching assistants and peer tutors, moderated chat rooms and listservs, opportunities for peer review of student work, and oral presentations and group work within large class settings.

Current Efforts: The Astronomy Learning Center is a large, collaborative office hour where students work on their homework assignments in an informal, group setting with GSIs and peers.

5.  Institutionalize curricular strategies. Departments could be encouraged to seek consensus on the content and learning objectives of large gateway courses, as well as the articulation between lower- and upper-division courses, so investments of time and resources in redesigning courses result in long-term payoffs. Wherever possible, course innovations and online instructional resources (learning modules, resources, images, archives) developed by individual faculty could be shared on an institution-wide basis and made accessible to other instructors as appropriate. Opportunities for team teaching and collaboration within and across departments could also be encouraged to foster knowledge transfer and new skill development.

Current Efforts: The Mathematics Department uses a shared syllabus for Mathematics 1A, 1B, 53, and 54. Lectures delivered by multiple instructors are similar in content. A faculty committee meets periodically to revise course material, often in response to other departments' requests.

6.  Improve the acquisition of information literacy and research skills in large-enrollment courses. The campus could continue to promote instructional materials and assignments that incorporate library research skills (including web-based products), the integration of library research assignments into gateway courses with complementary library instruction, and the assessment of the impact of library class sessions on student learning.

Current Efforts: Library Services for Classroom Instructors is currently available through the Teaching Library.

7.  Increase the use of instructional technology and provide appropriate technological support in large-enrollment courses. Strategies could include making technology tools (e.g., course websites, PowerPoint, and webcasting) more visible and accessible to faculty; providing adequate training; and demonstrating how such tools can improve student engagement, lead to more effective faculty/student/GSI contact, and decrease repetitive tasks such as grading. On-site technical support could be enhanced to assist with on-the-spot troubleshooting in large-enrollment courses, once faculty adopt technological innovations.

Current Efforts: Educational Technology Services offers a range of learning management systems and resources including CourseWeb and Webcast.Berkeley.

8.  Streamline systems and reduce administrative burdens. The campus could identify systems barriers and repetitive, time-consuming administrative functions performed by faculty and GSIs and develop strategies to address these, if appropriate, by using technology, so instructors can spend more time on pedagogy and working with students. These could include online assignments, quizzes, exams, grade books, and other forms of online assessment and course evaluations. Another area to explore is enhancing the capability of the Registrar's systems to reflect the complexity of managing course enrollments, especially during the first few weeks of class.

Current Efforts: The campus is working towards establishing an online grade book as part of CourseWeb. In addition, discussions will be held with the appropriate policy committees to explore ways to better manage course enrollments during the first weeks of class.

9.  Continue to improve classroom facilities and technological/physical infrastructure. The campus needs to upgrade more classrooms to reflect current pedagogical strategies, for example by adding moveable chairs, installing state-of-the-art presentation technologies in some classrooms, and ensuring an appropriate level of instructional technology in all general assignment classrooms.

Current Efforts: The campus has engaged in a long-term, comprehensive effort to improve its 240 general assignment classrooms and equip them with current classroom technology. The Classroom Renovation Program (1994) and the recommendations of the Task Force on Classroom Technology Development (1996) guide the campus’s efforts in this area. The Classroom Renovation Program was re-approved in 2001, with a new set of projects approved for 2001-08, and the Technology plan is under discussion and slated for an update. The campus classroom standard now calls for installation of basic instructional technology when new classrooms come online or when there is a major renovation. In the context of severe cuts to the campus’s classroom renovation budget, current efforts include attempting to prevent severe deterioration of classrooms during the budget crisis and developing new proposals for funding. Improving the learning environment is one of the priority areas targeted in the current Undergraduate Education Fundraising Initiative.

10.   Integrate assessment/evaluation at the course level and institutional level. On the course level, instructors need to be encouraged to develop student learning objectives and to conduct both formative and summative evaluation of learning outcomes. Learning in sections could be improved by having faculty and GSIs discuss the purpose and function of discussion sections, their relationship to the overall course objectives, and ways to identify and assess desired learning outcomes. On the institutional level, we need to continue to develop criteria to help us evaluate our large-enrollment courses, to identify which ones would benefit from improvement, to determine the effectiveness of changes undertaken, and to decide on the scale of change the campus can support.

Current Efforts: The Department of Chemistry received a National Science Foundation grant in 2001 to develop systematic criterion-referenced assessment for introductory chemistry classes in conjunction with the BEARS project (Berkeley Evaluation and Assessment Research Center) affiliated with the Graduate School of Education. This project, ChemQuery, is designed to carefully measure students' progress based on multiple criteria that are standard, use meaningful numerical expressions, and describe accurately what is happening at a particular point in time.

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