Community of Practice: Designing Engaging Large Classes

Description

Large-enrollment courses come with distinct challenges. Building rapport, encouraging participation, and creating a sense of community are all more difficult when class sizes make individual connection harder. The Large Enrollment Community of Practice brings together instructors who teach large classes to share strategies, troubleshoot challenges, and develop practical approaches for designing courses that feel engaging and personal, even at scale. Whether your class contains 200 students or 50 students, please join us to build a community and to create some resources to support your own large class and others.  

Professional Development Objectives  

Through facilitated sessions and peer engagement, participants will: 

• Explore effective large enrollment teaching techniques
• Identify design strategies that support community in large courses
• Develop and implement assessment tools that help our students build disciplinary skills AND allow for frequent, consistent MANEAGABLE feedback 
• Produce a final deliverable to share at the Teaching and Learning Conference that promotes effective large enrollment course design to your colleagues  

Deliverable  

Faculty participants will be responsible for submitting the following at the end of the session:  

• A group-designed large enrollment design strategies page for the CTL website
• A group-designed set of sample large enrollment activities that support engagement and community building in large enrollment courses
• A group presentation at the Teaching and Learning Conference 

Participation Requirement

Participants must attend 5 two-hour gatherings between fall and spring semester. The group will work together to pick dates that best suit everyone’s schedules.  

Other work outside those sessions will include researching materials to share with the group, co-writing materials and preparing sample activities to share with the larger Cortland community.