The holy-grail of assessment in large class HE teaching, IMHO, is finding an assessment process that is in equal measure meaningful, equitable to students and manageable for me as a busy academic.

I have blogged on this topic previously, and a couple of years on I want to share my experiences of moving my coursework from individual to group-work on a large international post-graduate taught module.

In previous years the coursework element of my MSc unit on  Project Finance for Infrastructure has typically comprised an individual essay with a strict 6 page limit (including all references, diagrams etc) on a topic which requires students to critically appraise the theories of project finance and to compare them with what happens in practice on a real project case study.  Although I had a brief dalliance with a group based wiki assessment in 2009, the technological issues that arose had me retreating to the safety of a word based individual essay in 2010. This academic year (2014/15) I decided that enough was enough. My rationale for moving to group-work was largely pragmatic: I wanted to reduce the burden of marking, yet try to ensure that the assessment remained meaningful and equitable.

Here is what happened and what I have learned from the process. Continue reading Moving from individual to group based coursework →

As academics, I think we can often feel like this image here of an overloaded truck.  There are many competing demands on our time: research, teaching, administration, student experience and the all important NSS.  Who doesn’t feel like this some days ?

Large class teaching can be one more pressure that we have to deal with.  There are myriad challenges to address, such as managing student expectations, being available to students but also having a life outside work, and perhaps worst of all the relentlessness and never-ending nature of the marking.

In the early days, when I asked for help about how to deliver good teaching to very large classes, a distinguished elder scholar who shall remain nameless retorted “I just wouldn’t do them” – not that helpful to a newbie academic!  My hope today is to offer tips that are a bit more useful than that, yet grounded in the reality that large classes are not going to go away and we as academics need to deal with them. (A copy of the presentation on which this blog post is based is available on Slideshare ) Continue reading Reflections on Large Class Teaching →