The classroom, whether physical or virtual, is the primary point of contact between institutions and undergraduates, so it is the single most important site for students to experience welcome and care, to be inspired to learn, to build webs of relationships, and to ask questions of meaning and purpose. Peter Felten and Leo Lambert, Relationship-Rich Education, 2020

One of the clearest ways to improve the student experience in a large class is to reduce student anonymity. As one WSU instructor put it, the trick is to give students personalized attention while staying efficient with your time. Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center suggests these techniques:

• Arrive early and stay a little late for in-person classes, so you can talk informally with students.
• Learn names as best you can. At Wichita State, opening the Banner 9 roster for your course helps, because it includes student photos.
• Invite small groups to meet with you outside class. Eating in a campus dining hall once a week and inviting students to join you is one simple approach.
• Foster student-to-student relationships with in-class small group activities. Online, the Blackboard Groups tool gives students a manageable set of peers to work and bond with.
• Be a real person. It can take courage to be the genuine you with a large class, and students respond well to authenticity and openness.
• Encourage questions and answer them promptly, always within the response times you have set.

There are many other ways to help students feel seen. Email OIR@wichita.edu to think through what fits your content, your students, and your own style.

Dedicated instructors have worked for years to teach large classes in a way that's active, engaging, and inclusive. Some of the criticisms of large classes are basically criticisms of uninterrupted lecturing. But it's possible to gather hundreds of students together and do something else. Beckie Supiano, Teaching a Sea of Students, 2023

Lecturing is still a common and effective way to convey information and prompt students to think, and even lecture courses benefit from personalization and interactivity. You do not have to overhaul the course to get there. A useful goal is to work in two or three active elements at first, rather than trying to replace lecture all at once, and to build from there. Setting the goal itself often changes how a session unfolds. Some approachable ideas:

• Use a think, pair, share. This takes only a few minutes of class time. In a large room you might call on five to eight groups to share a sentence or two. Online, students can share through a digital whiteboard or a tool like Flip.
• Use the Groups tool in Blackboard to create small cohorts for synchronous or asynchronous discussion and deep dives.
• Try Microsoft Teams with your Blackboard course. Once integrated, you can use Teams messaging, the Reflect tool for quick check-ins on how students feel about a topic, and a shared Class Notebook for notes and questions.
• Add real-time polling with Microsoft Forms, which you can insert directly into a PowerPoint slide and show live during class. One WSU biology instructor uses polling in a large General Biology course to check the pulse of the room and to revisit a concept with a quick chalk talk when responses show confusion.
• Create a shared question space where students ask and answer questions during a lecture or across a unit. A GTA can monitor it for accuracy during class. Answering peers' questions gives students a chance to work with what they are learning, and it builds community. Good options include a shared Microsoft Whiteboard in person or a dedicated discussion board online.
• Encourage questions in the moment. Ask the student's name, repeat the question for the whole room, and speak to the student directly when you answer.

For larger shifts, some instructors flip the class, moving first exposure to content before the session so class time can go to problem solving and active work. Strong GTA support makes these approaches easier to run at scale. For more on active learning in large courses, see the Derek Bok Center's overview.

Every student needs regular, reliable feedback on their progress, and students in large classes may rely on it more because they have less personal contact with the instructor. Yale's Poorvu Center defines formative assessment as the informal tools that identify misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and help close them. Summative assessment, by contrast, evaluates learning formally, usually for a grade.

Large classes often lean on summative assessment because interaction is harder and grading loads are high. With a little planning, you can still add formative opportunities:

• Low-stakes or no-stakes practice quizzes that students can take and retake let them test themselves on content that tends to trip people up, and they get used to how you write questions. Setting these up well in your LMS is covered in Use your LMS well.
• Self-graded homework during in-person class lets students meet their own mistakes in real time, turning the grading step into another chance to learn.
• Anonymous pop quizzes that students turn in, then redistribute and grade for one another before discussing as a class. The mild, low-stakes surprise can aid retention. Research links small to moderate stress to better memory consolidation.
• Small dry-erase boards, available free through OIR, let small groups work problems together in person. Online or hybrid classes can use a shared whiteboard in Zoom, Teams, or Microsoft 365.

Many WSU instructors point to student preparation as a major factor in a large course. Preparation always matters, but when a struggling student shares your attention with a hundred others, poor preparation can quickly erode their confidence and chances of success. It helps to address preparation early and directly.

One step that works in any class is to share a complete, detailed syllabus, with content, assignments, and due dates, as far ahead as possible. You can distribute a syllabus through the email function in Banner 9, and you can upload it there as well. Beyond that, a few gentle nudges help students do what they need to do:

• Before the term begins, email the syllabus along with links to resources that help students get ready for the course.
• Before or during the first week, offer a no-stakes "assess your skills" quiz covering what students should already know. Use the automatic feedback to point them to resources that fill any gaps before those skills are needed.
• As the course unfolds, use release conditions in Blackboard to deliver supporting content automatically when a student scores below a threshold you set.

For more content to support or enrich your course, your Subject Librarian can help you find University Libraries resources.

Our results suggest that a light-touch intervention that increased professor engagement significantly improved students' perceptions of the professor and the course performance of underrepresented minority students in their early years of college. Scott Carrell and Michal Kurlaender, My Professor Cares, 2022

In a large class, your learning management system is the tool that keeps you connected to individual students and helps you catch problems early. A student's activity in the LMS is one of the stronger signals of how they are doing, so the system can tell you who may need a nudge well before a low exam grade would. Wichita State uses Blackboard.

Reach out with light-touch messages

Short, supportive messages from an instructor go a long way, especially in a large course where contact is limited. In Blackboard, open="" the Gradebook settings, the gear icon, to have students receive automatic activity-stream alerts based on days since their last activity or when their overall grade drops below a percentage you choose. To send your own message, open="" Course Activity from the Gradebook settings or the Analytics link in the top menu, sort students by overall grade, hours in the course, or days of inactivity, check the students you want to reach, and choose Send Message. You write these messages yourself, so students get praise when they do well and support when they stumble.

Spot trouble early

Watch for the students who have not logged in for a week or who miss a low-stakes assignment, and reach out with a brief, personal message. Early, specific outreach to disengaged students is one of the most effective things you can do to keep them in the course, and the LMS makes it possible to do at scale.

Let the system give feedback for you

Build low-stakes or no-stakes practice quizzes that pull from a question bank, randomize question and answer order, and allow retakes. Students get immediate feedback without adding to your grading load. Pair these with release conditions so that a low score automatically opens up review material, and a strong score can open="" enrichment.

Build peer connection and consistent grading

The Groups tool gives students a smaller community for discussion inside a large course. When you work with GTAs, a shared rubric and a well-organized gradebook keep multiple="" graders aligned so students receive consistent feedback no matter who grades their work.

Wichita State provides many technologies and services to support instruction. If you have a question about any of them, OIR@wichita.edu can help, or point you to the right office.

• University Libraries offers library guides organized by subject, by course, and by help topic, and your Subject Librarian can help with anything not listed.
• Microsoft Office 365 is free to students and available to instructors. Useful tools include OneDrive for storage and collaboration, Sway for interactive presentations, PowerPoint, Stream for video, Word, Excel, and Teams, especially Teams integrated with Blackboard. Microsoft 365 Copilot adds AI assistance across several of these apps.
• Snagit is provided to instructors and staff for capturing your screen as still images or video, and it pairs well with OneDrive storage.
• Blackboard Ally is best known for the accessibility dials next to your content, and it also lets students download alternative formats such as audio or e-reader versions. Email OIR@wichita.edu if you would like help using it.
• Other Blackboard tools worth exploring include the test tool for quizzes and worksheets, journals, discussion boards, assignments, release conditions for pacing content, and announcements paired with course messages.
• Other software available to WSU users includes Microsoft Azure, ArcGIS, SPSS, and EndNote, among others.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education is free to WSU instructors through MyWSU and regularly covers teaching at any class size, including Large Classes Can Be a Joy and Peer Instruction in Large Classes.

If you are teaching or preparing to teach a large or very large course, your Wichita State colleagues who were surveyed about their large-enrollment courses offer this advice:

• Use Blackboard for tests and assignments.
• Make your in-person lectures mandatory.
• Line up good GTAs to help with grading, keep in regular contact with them, and support them.
• When one student asks for clarification, others usually have the same question. Add a slide to each lecture with the questions you received since last time and go over them. Students get clarity, and you cut down on duplicate questions.
• Ask your students what they need for a better learning experience, and follow up.
• Consider a flipped classroom, using class meetings for active, hands-on work.
• Be as engaging as you can. Use polling to get real-time answers, use digital grading tools where you can, and be clear about what you will grade by hand. Discussion boards help.
• Set clear rules and stick to them.
• Guest lectures break up the routine and give students something to look forward to.

WSU Library Instructional Services compiled these resources on teaching large enrollment classes. Each links to the University Libraries catalog.

• Teach Students How to Learn, Saundra Yancy McGuire with Stephanie McGuire.
• What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain.
• Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Dee Fink.
• Engaging Large Classes, Christine Stanley.
• Teaching the Large College Class, Frank Hopper.
• How Learning Works, Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman.
• Small Teaching, James Lang.
• Student-Centered Pedagogy and Course Transformation at Scale, C. Levesque-Bristol.