Teaching with Technology in a Large Lecture Classroom

Good instructors seek to provide high quality educational experiences to students, regardless of the teaching venue.  Whether teaching a small graduate seminar or 250 first-year students, dedicated teachers engage, inform, and inspire.

Even the most dedicated instructor, however, can be challenged when teaching a large lecture class. ITS-Instructional Services and the Center for Teaching have designed this guide to help instructors tackle that challenge and thereby enhance both their students’ learning and their own professional lives . We hope it provides, practical, adaptable, effective information and ideas.  The suggestions presented here are neither prescriptive nor exhaustive, but designed as a smorgasbord from which you might select according to your disciplinary, course, and curricular needs and the learning needs of your students.

We also hope this web resource will spark additional conversation about large-lecture instruction.  Please contribute your own teaching ideas here, which we will post along with your name on this dynamic resource.

How many students constitute a large lecture class?

The answer to this question depends on the discipline, the course, the teaching context, and the nature of the classroom experience. At Iowa, a large could include anywhere from 50-450 students.

We hope this guide will be useful to any instructors who feel challenged by classes they consider “large.” 

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Engaging students in a large lecture hall can be daunting even for the most seasoned faculty member. Attendance, cheating and assessing student knowledge retention are just a few of the challenges instructors face.

This website is designed to give instructors tools and strategies to help make the most of the large lecture environment; to help make it a place of learning and growth rather than frustration and anxiety.