Teaching Large Classes

Teaching Large Classes

Teaching a large class, however you may define "large", comes with a unique set of challenges. Some things may be the same as a smaller class but managing, coordinating, and supporting many more students can be daunting. This resource breaks the challenge into three key areas—prep work you do before the class begins, things to consider for when you are in the classroom, and (probably the biggest challenge of all) figuring out to grade a ton of student assignments.

Internal resources are linked throughout the page and at the end of the page are references, books, articles, and external resources that may be helpful to you.

Preparing to teach a large class is not so different from a smaller class. You'll still need to do all the same steps you would for a smaller class—preparing lessons, assignments, activities, a syllabus etc - but there are unique challenges that having so many students bring that you want to design around. Dealing with a hundred or more students calls on you to streamline your behind-the-screens workflow as much as you can.

Backwards design is a key course design method that centers student learning objectives. These are the first thing that you should be determining for your course and then the rest of your class design and preparation is in service of helping your students achieve your learning objectives. Aligned and transparent design is a related method where you ensure that you students know how assignments and activities are designed to help them practice skills and knowledge to reach your learning objectives. View our page on backwards design and our page on transparent design to learn more.

Backwards and transparent design helps you streamline your workflow by acting as a clean litmus test. When deciding when or how to use an activity, the guiding principle becomes if a considered activity, lesson, reading, etc. help your students achieve your learning goals. If not, toss it or make some modifications. Transparent design also has shown to improve student academic confidence and sense of belonging in the classroom across many traditionally marginalized groups (Winkelmes, et al. 2016).

Internal research by our Office of The Provost found that students believe Canvas course organization and the ease of finding course materials is a key teaching practice to make a course accessible. A well-organized Canvas page helps students find information, assignments, and materials easily. Streamlining the design of your page helps prevent students from being overwhelmed and getting lost while navigating through your page. UO Online offers guidance on providing a clear path through your course in Canvas. Some other quick helpful tips are below.

• We recommend organizing your Canvas modules in time—modules for each week, or each course topic, or each course unit. This will focus student attention on the moment and what needs to be done in the immediate future.
• You should remove items from the course navigation bar (on left side of your course canvas page) that students do not need access to. See our how-to-guide on streamlining the Canvas course navigation menu.
• Use a course welcome module to orient your students to your Canvas site.
• Ask your teaching team to review your course Canvas page to see if your structure makes sense to them. Can they easily find information or content you request for them. If not, some re-structuring may be needed.

UO Online has recently released three Canvas Course Templates for instructors to use. Check them out and see if any speak to you and can help streamline and simplify your workload in preparing Canvas.

Increasing your class's student count is going to greatly increase the number of questions your students have. You can easily get lost in dozens (or hundreds) of emailed questions a day if you aren't communicating well with students and providing them with good resources to find the answers for themselves. Below are some key suggestions for improving communication.

• As noted above, clear Canvas navigation and organization can help students find the information they need. At the start of the term, encourage students to look to Canvas for answers and walk them through where to find help in your Canvas site. This will help head off their questions. There are a variety of ways you can do this in Canvas, such as

  • Including a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page for your class
  • Using a class Q&A discussion board that everyone in your teaching team can respond to
  • Giving clear instructions for communicating with the teaching team. Should they talk to their discussion leaders before emailing you? Tell them that. Is one TA responsible for making sure the gradebook is accurate, tell your students who it is and how to contact them.
  • Including a page that offers directions for where to go for help - where they can get technical support, when teaching team office hours are, information about the TAEC, etc.
  • Including a page for campus support resources - the health center, counseling services, basic needs support, etc.

  Most of these items are built into our Canvas Welcome module and our Course Templates in Canvas Commons.

• Make important announcements at the start of class. Yelling "your essays are due Sunday night" over 200 squeaking chairs in the final 15 seconds of class might not be taken in by your students. Putting those announcements at the start of class, including displaying them in writing on a slide, helps students recognize it (and, ideally, setup a reminder for themselves). Displaying that slide as students walk into class and have a seat can also give them another clear reminder.
• Automate Canvas to help send reminders. Make sure that assignments in Canvas have due dates so they will show up in your students' Canvas To Do list (on the far right side of Canvas, where it reminds you to do your grading). You can also set up announcements to post at a certain time, allowing you to pre-plan reminders for major assignment due-dates.
• Use your teaching team to help answer questions. Assign some GE FTE and LA workload to answering questions - emails from students that are forwarded to one person, in a class discussion board, or some other format. You can rotate who is responsible for answering these weekly. You could also designate certain members to answer certain types of questions - gradebook upkeep, make up work questions, managing absences, extension requests, etc. Make sure it is clear to your students who to contact for these different items.

Offices hours for both you and your teaching team are invaluable for large classes. You should work together to vary the times throughout the week that you all hold office hours. If office hours are immediately after class each day, your students who have class right after yours cannot attend. 

There is evidence that students are often unclear of what office hours are or when it is appropriate for them to attend. Describing the purpose and usefulness of office hours (and even renaming them to something more friendly like "help hours") can improve their attendance and reduce needs to reach out at other times (Mowreader 2023).

Just before your class begins, there are some important things to do! 

• Launch your Canvas site as soon as it's ready. UO policy on Canvas use requires each course Canvas page to launch by the first day of classes each term. Launching your course before then gives time for your students to orient to it and find out desired information like workload, course materials, and how to contact you.
• Reach out to your students before your first day of class together. Welcome them to the class by introduce yourself and the course, sharing any important information they might need for your first class, such as directing them to check out your Canvas Welcome Module. A Canvas announcement can serve this purpose well.
• Meet with your teaching team and careful define responsibilities. Check out our page on coordinating teaching teams for key questions to consider. You may also want to complete a workload allocation form with your GEs. This form, defined in article 9 of the GTFF collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and recommended by the union, outlines GE duties for the term and expected time commitments for each responsibility. Find a template for the workload allocation form on Graduate Studies' Academic forms page.
• Visit your classroom.
  • Explore and experiment with the instructional technology in the room. Fumbling with the sound system or getting the projector to display your slides on your first day is embarrassing. It is way worse with hundreds of eyes watching you do so. AV Services' Classroom website has images of each classroom, its location on UO's map, and details about the room including the technology available in it.
  • Explore what your students' experiences might be in the classroom. Sit in different locations around the room and get a sense of what students' view of the black/white boards are and where screens are located throughout the room. Display a slide with different sized texts and images. What font size is too small to read easily for everyone? Make sure all your text is LARGER than that size on all your course slides.

How every instructor approaches their first day in class is unique to the instructor and often the discipline. Below are general themes we encourage you to address in some way on that first day.

1. Build Classroom Community. You can do this by introducing yourself (in person) and the members of your teaching team. Also give students time and space to meet their classmates, chatting information with the folks around them. Giving them a clear prompt to discuss can be helpful to breaking the ice between strangers.
2. Set the tone of your class. Discuss what your teaching pedagogy is, why you use it, and then practice it. If 75% of your class will be students discussing ideas with neighbors, you should expose them to how that will play out on the first day. Also be sure to leave ample time for student questions on your first day. They will have them - making sure they get a real opportunity to ask them reveals your interest in their experiences.
3. Get student buy-in. Discuss with students, or let them brainstorm, why they should care about your class or its content. Share your journey in your discipline with your students.
4. Describe the Course. Clearly describe the structure of the course - are there labs, recitations, discussions sections, etc.? Describe key policies that your students may care about - grading, attendance, etc. Give your students a tour of your Canvas site. Point out the repeated structure of your modules and getting help pages or sections of the welcome module. This may feel infantilizing, but with hundreds of students any ways you can guide them towards independence will save you and your teaching team time and energy.

Your learning objectives are set. Your Canvas site has launched. Thanks to your welcoming email last week, you now stand in front of dozens or hundreds of students plus a team of GEs, undergrad assistants, or other faculty. Don't fret! You can successfully lead the team and guide your students towards achieving your course's learning objectives. Let's get started.

Making the large class feel smaller can be accomplished well by building a strong community within the course. As suggested above, start on the very first day by introducing yourself. Share not just your academic credentials, but sharing some personal details (hobbies, background, etc.) can help your students feel connected to you. You should also give your teaching team space to introduce themselves (if they regularly attend class) or invite them to attend just the first day so students will see a familiar face when they attend their first discussion, recitation, or lab section.

In addition to introducing yourself, give students space to introduce themselves. They can be given a few minutes to chat with their nearby neighbors, do public introductions on a Canvas discussion board, or do introductions to smaller groups if your class has lab or discussion sections. For you to learn about your students, you can assign an introductory survey through canvas to learn about their interests, goals, backgrounds, pronouns, reasons for taking your class, etc. Our Canvas Welcome Module has examples of such a survey. These surveys are also helpful for you review before a scheduled meeting with a student. Understand what they hope to take away from your class can help guide your discussion with them and better personalize your support.

Another method to build community between your students is to form standing groups of students for in-class discussion. These "cooperative base groups" can chat regularly both about non-class topics (favorite foods, hobbies, weekend plans) but also their plans to succeed in the course (exam studying strategies, challenges faced in assignments, tips for taking away the most out of a class). You can read more about cooperative base groups in our Student Success Toolkit.

You can read more suggestions for building community elsewhere on our website.

Students cannot, of course, be part of a community if they aren't in class!  When considering if you will require attendance, your focus should be on the pedagogical reasoning for your attendance policy and the implications for it. How does your attendance policy align with and impact student achievement of your course learning objectives?

• If you do plan to require attendance, also consider how you will track it and how does attendance fit into student assessment (and ultimately their grade).
• If you do not require attendance, also consider how you can encourage attendance and how you will continue to support students who cannot attend class. 

Of critical importance for attendance is UO's reason neutral attendance policy, which states

Instructors who require attendance and/or penalize absences “shall not ask for reasons for absences and shall not distinguish between ‘excused’ and ‘unexcused’ absences since there is no equitable way to confirm the veracity of student-provided reasons or documentation outside the university context”.

Why students are absent, with a few exceptions, should not factor into how you handle student absences. We offer suggestions for how to enact the Senate’s ‘Course Attendance and Engagement’ Policy. There are five exceptions to this policy, where university policy to allow for absences under certain conditions overrides course-level policy (for example, if your policy is that students can miss three classes without it impacting their grade, additional absences for the exceptions cannot count against your three "allowed" absences). Some of these exceptions require student documentation submitted to the University. Faculty cannot decline student exceptions but should reach out to the appropriate university units for support about enacting an accommodation. Details of the exceptions are included on the Course Attendance and Engagement Policy Interpretation webpage from the Provost's Office.

Another way to make students both feel part of a community AND help their learning is to use active learning. These are techniques that get students doing, thinking, creating, analyzing, discussing, etc. rather than listening and taking notes. Best practices interleave student activities and periods of instructor lecturing. Evidence shows the strongest student learning gains AND higher student satisfaction than purely lecturing at the room (Martella, et a. 2024). 

There are hundreds of activities you could do in a classroom, but you want activities tailored to large classes—ones that require few (or no) supplies and ones that do not require students to move around much. Our page on student engagement techniques notes specific activity types that fit these criteria (look for the asterisk, * , in the lists of activities). We highlight four activity types below that you can add to an existing large course or build into a new large course without much heavy lifting. Their linked names go to more details on our student engagement page.

• Multiple Choice Questions: Students select an answer to multiple-choice questions using clickers, hand signals, colored cards, Zoom poll, Canvas surveys, etc. Student responses can be graded for accuracy, tracked for participation, or not graded at all.
• Think-Pair-Share: Students think or work on their own, then discuss with a neighbor, then share their combined thoughts with the class.
• Minute Paper or Quick Write: Students take about a minute to reflect and respond to a prompt in writing.
• Small Group Discussion: Students chat in small groups to discuss the answer to a question, analyze a case study, problem solve, etc. Results of their discussion can be shared with the class.

Asking students to work independently or in groups within a large class can be a challenge as you and your teaching team may be unable to interact with each group. You can support their work (and help keep them focused) by ensuring the task to complete is clearly defined (see the section on Backwards and Transparent Design) and that you give them appropriate time constraints. When doing group work, outline expectations and norms for group work with students early in the term. Our page on Designing Discussions offers more suggestions for planning discussions in general, but the same basic ideas work for setting up smaller groups for success.

When running a large class, you might have GEs, undergrad assistants you have recruited, and other faculty or staff collaborating with you. Below are tips for running this team effectively.

• Have clearly defined duties and responsibilities for each team member. This is both good practice and a right of GEs as detailed in article 9 of the GTFF CBA. You can use a workload allocation form to help outline those responsibilities at the very start of a term. Find a template for the workload allocation form on Graduate Studies' Academic forms page.
• Schedule regular meetings of the team. Use these to look ahead at upcoming material or assignments, look back on challenges the team or students are facing, and keep everyone on the same page regarding course pedagogy and policy.
• Be mindful of GE weekly workload. If some weeks are heavy on grading, consider re-adjusting other duties for that week. Article 22 of the GTFF CBA sets a limit that no more 15% of a GE's full FTE can be assigned to them within one week of the term, unless previously agreed upon.
• Build relationships with your team. Use informal opportunities to connect with your team members. Chat before meetings. Invite team members to coffee. Share a meal before or after a grading rush.
• As proposed in the section on Day One (and Negative One), have a pre-term meeting with your whole team. Check out our page on coordinating teaching teams for key questions to consider during the meeting.

While the work you do to prepare assignments and lectures may not change that much going from a small class to a large one, grading will definitely grow. Hopefully, you'll have some GEs to assist with grading, but well-designed assignments can greatly help your team grade efficiently for in a course.

Canvas is a tool that can greatly help you and your team grade efficiently. When grading work digitally, you are saved from needing to collect, manage, grade, and return student papers. Even outside of Canvas's grading tools, this can save so much time.

Canvas offers three types of graded activities, all of which can be graded using its built-in grading tool called the SpeedGrader. See our how-to-guide on using the speed-grader. The SpeedGrader has useful features that can help you grade efficiently, which are outlined below. 

In addition to the help that SpeedGrader gives for each activity type described in the table above, SpeedGrader also has a Comment Library that will store your comments on student work and allow you to reuse them for later assignments - rather than retype your comments. The comment library is found in the quote box just above the Assignment Comment box in SpeedGrader. There are a few important things to note about the Comment Library:

• Adding a comment from the comment library will overwrite whatever you've already written in the comment box. Be sure to submit each comment you've made before pulling in a comment to re-use from the library.
• To add a comment to the library, you must open the library and manually add a comment to the library. SpeedGrader does not automatically store each comment you've written.
• The comment library is only useable for the (whole) assignment comments. You cannot use the comment library for annotations in assignments nor as comments for individual quiz questions. If you want store and re-use comments for annotations or individual quiz questions, you can copy your comments into a Word document and then copy-and-paste them into later student assignments from your Word Doc. In doing this, you can also store information on any penalties to student scores you want to apply for that comment to help keep your grading uniform across student work.
• The comment library spans your whole course. If you add a comment to the library for one assignment, it will be useable for all other assignments in the course. This can be helpful to reuse comments later but could also make the library big and cumbersome late in your course.

Using a rubric to grade assignments can save grading time but, of course, does increase your preparation time as you must draft the rubric. This tradeoff hopefully saves you time overall and that likelihood goes way up with large classes. Even a little bit of time saved while grading each individual student's work builds up fast with lots and lots of students.

Rubrics have utility outside of just saving time grading. For the instructor, rubrics require you to distill for yourself what the key aspects of student work on an assignment are. If you keep a global version of the rubric as you grade (i.e. make a tally mark each time you use one of the rubric entries while grading) you can easily identify places where students are struggling collectively. For students, a rubric describes exactly what your expectations are for student work. This clarity helps support students generally but is particularly beneficials for those with marginalized identities (low-income, first-gen, etc.). Using the rubric also promotes fairness and consistency as you grade.

When designing a rubric for an assignment:

1. Define what criteria you want to grade. These should generally be linked to the learning objectives of the assignment.
2. Describe what student work that achieves your criteria would look like. This is a performance standard that students should hopefully be aiming to achieve. These descriptions will be at the highest level of your rubric, or near the highest level if there are ways students can go above and beyond "just" achieving the learning objective.
3. Decide on how many rating levels you want to use in your rubric and give them names. It's generally recommended to use 3-5 rating levels, but ultimately you want to use as many as needed to clearly describe the range of performance students might do for each criterion.
4. Fill out the rest of the rubric's grid by describing key shortcomings that student work may show (for ratings below your performance standard) or by describing ways students may truly excel at the learning objectives (for ratings above your performance standard).

A fuller website on rubrics is in development. Until then, consider attending our workshop on Building Rubrics for Student Success and Efficient Grading. You can also check out this how-to guide for using rubrics for grading assignments in Canvas.

In addition to its benefits for student clarity and equity, using transparent design for assignments can help grading efficiency. Transparent design gives students clear descriptions of the purpose of an assignment, the task to be completed, and criteria for success. For instructors, transparent design helps limit you juggling incomplete or poorly organized student work if you are providing clear instructions. Having the criteria for success articulated (and learning objectives as part of the assignment purpose) gives you a good starting place to develop a rubric or other grading guidelines. Within our Canvas Course Templates, both the assignment and discussion templates are built with transparent design as a goal.

Different software can be used to make some assignments auto-graded, at least partially. Canvas quizzes have a variety of question types that can be auto-graded. Publishers of textbooks often have software suites that can be used to design auto-graded assignments. WeBWorK is a platform that allows for auto-grading many mathematical questions and is used heavily in introductory math courses at UO. 

With auto-graded assignments students can get immediate feedback if they are right or wrong, but you can improve the quality of that feedback in several ways. 

• Add comments to multiple choice options: Canvas, allows you to add comments to individual multiple-choice options when designing a quiz. Students will see these when reviewing their work. Write comments for incorrect answers (distractors) that help students understand why that option isn't correct or what misunderstanding they may have that might lead to that response.
• Let students complete assignments multiple times: Students grow when a mistake can be quickly rectified. Be careful about how many times students can re-answer the same question so that they aren't just randomly guessing until they figure out which option is correct.
• Use question groups in Canvas: If you have multiple questions that address the same idea in different ways or contexts, put them within a group in a Canvas quiz. Canvas will draw one (or as many as you want) randomly and ask it to students. If students can redo the quiz, they may get a different random question to really check their understanding of the concept.
• Use simple pre- and post-class assignments: Pre-class questions can help students check their basic understanding of a reading before delving deeper into during class. Post-class questions let students check their understanding after class and in preparation for later assignments. Both of these low-stakes assignments are well suited for auto-grading.
• Review statistics for auto-graded assignments: Canvas can give you breakdown of how many students chose each answer to a quiz question. Use this to review areas where students are struggling and share your insight with students. Are a third of your students giving an answer that points to a specific misconception? Let them know that and discuss the misconception in more detail with the class. 

For low-stakes assignments or for grading individual questions use simple grading scales. Do you need to grade a discussion board post on a scale of 0-100 like exams? Do individual homework questions need a 20-point rubric? Some simple scales are given below along with their intended meaning.

You may object to the "no answer" score on the four-point scale being 1 point even though the student has done nothing. You can adjust to a range of 0-3 points if you want. Also keep in mind that 1/4 are the odds of randomly guessing correctly on four-option multiple choice questions. If 25% is possible for doing nothing besides randomly choosing answers, is 25% acceptable here too?

Grading for completion (the two-point scale) can be controversial. You should decide for yourself what sort of assignments or under what conditions "completion credit" is acceptable to you and beneficial to students.

These provide quick numbers for grading, but some more detailed feedback should also be included. When leaving a comment for a student on why they've earned that score or how they could improve to a higher score, copy the comment into a Word document. When another student makes the same error(s), you can copy your pre-written reasoning.

For lower-stakes assignments with different parts, only grade a portion of the full assignment. Those might be individual problems in a STEM homework set, individual questions in a weekly reflection, pieces of a highly structured assignment (lab report sections, etc.). Don't tell students ahead of time which pieces you will grade, because otherwise they will only focus on those ones. 

After you've chosen "secret" parts of the assignment to grade, some students may have a unlucky assignment - one in which they only do poorly on the parts you've chosen. This might drag down their assignment grade, but only because they were unlucky about which parts of the assignment you graded. You can mitigate this a few ways:

• Only grade a portion of an assignment if they are low-stakes. An unlucky weekly reflection is unlikely to have a major impact on a student grade if each reflection is only a percent or two of a student's final grade.
• Only grade a portion of an assignment when there are many assignments of that type to average over.  An unlucky homework assignment is unlikely to have a major impact on students if it is averaged over 10 homeworks throughout the term.
• Allow students to drop the lowest score for that assignment type. If a student can drop one or two homework assignments, an unlucky homework will vanish.
• Including completion credit for the ungraded questions. If half the points for an assignment are for the graded portion and half are for just completing the ungraded portion, the impact of an unlucky assignment is mitigated.
• If a student has an unlucky assignment, allow them to request you to fully grade an alternative question in the assignment to replace one you have graded.  You can even try do this automatically for students who you notice have low scores even though they have completed the assignment fully. Give explicit guidelines for when you will this for students so that every student who doesn't do perfectly on the graded questions doesn't request a re-grade.

This grading system may not sit well with some students. Be clear with your students about the policy from the start of class - how you plan to use it, which assignments are graded this way, which ways are you ensuring that unlucky assignments do not ruin a student's final grade, and the benefits of them getting practice even though you may not fully evaluate it.

Just like in small classes, in large classes students will miss class and assignments occasionally and they will want to make them up. Planning ahead to deal with this is critical. 

Rather than making ad-hoc decisions, university policy asks that syllabi have language on handling make-up work for students. The provost's office has sample syllabus language for late work and missed exams that you can adapt to your needs.

In addition to making decisions on how students will handle late work, you should also plan for how your teaching team will handle late work. Consider these two questions for your course:

1. How will you assign it?

What work will you need to do to get make-up work to students? The simplest way to avoid adding extra work to your plate throughout the term is pre-create a system for students to access and complete late work without needing to request it. 

One way to do this is setting up Canvas Assignments with an "available until" deadline. This will allow students to submit work after the due date. Students that submit the work after the deadline will just get their work flagged as being submitted late. How, and if, that work gets a grade penalty is set by you.

Another way to do this is by pre-creating make-up assignments. Posting the make-up assignments in Canvas can let students access them without needing to contact you for them. This also has of the benefit of giving extra practice opportunities to students who were able to submit their work on time. 

A third way to do it is just not to have make-up assignments - instead allow students to drop some number of missed assignments without them counting in their final grade. Do keep in mind that this policy should not conflict with exceptions to the reason-neutral attendance policy. Coursework missed for exempted students must be accepted without penalty, including not automatically counting as a dropped score.

2. How will it fit into your course grading rhythm?

You should strive to get make-up work graded in a timely way, for all the same student benefits as grading non-late assignments. However, an influx of late or make-up assignments can throw off your plans for timely grading. Make a plan to ensure any late work can get graded without delaying other grading work. 

For example, set aside specific time to focus on make-up work. If there is none (possible early in the term but unlikely later) - hurray, unexpected free time! 

You could also assign one member of your teaching team to deal with make-up work each week. Rotate this responsibility to different members throughout the term but be careful of other duties already assigned to them. Depending on your team size and availability, you could alleviate one person from other grading duties for that week and allow them to just focus on make-up work. For example, if you have 7 team members, you would divide up grading workload between only 6 people each week, with the seventh dealing only with make-up work. You wouldn't need to do this every week, just occasionally to get back on track with grading. The week before an exam or other summative assignment would be a good week to use this strategy.