Robert Stephan: Scaling Techniques for Asynchronous Online Courses

2023, Day2-2023, Sessions-2023

How do you provide a personalized, seminar-like experience in a large online class? The issue of scaling undergraduate courses while encouraging academic rigor and individualized learning experiences applies to both in-person and online courses alike. Yet online instruction – especially in an asynchronous modality – brings this question even more prominently to the fore, especially in an environment in which many large, state schools tie budgets to course enrollments and student credit hours.

The goal of this session is to discuss some of the problems of, paradoxes with, and solutions to scaling course enrollment sizes in online asynchronous courses. To accomplish this, I draw heavily upon my own experiences. In the past seven years as an online teacher at the University of Arizona, my enrollments have grown from about 25 students to around 500 students per course. And as a teaching-track faculty member, I usually teach three of these per semester. My goal is to share some of the strategies that have worked well for me in managing the logistics of these courses (e.g., course design, grading, TA management) while also providing an engaging educational experience for the students.

We will begin by discussing some of the driving factors that incentivize high online course enrollments, such as budgeting practices, limited physical classroom space, and instructor pay. From there, the conversation will move to defining the problematic issues with large class sizes, with a particular focus on how these play out in the online classroom. These can include everything from uneven grading support to lack of meaningful discussion. Finally, we will turn our sights towards potential solutions for maintaining student attention and engagement within the high-enrollment online course context. These solutions incorporate relatively new collaborative learning technologies (e.g., PlayPosit, VoiceThread, and Perusall) as well as course and lecture design choices that can be employed across any platform. Along the way, we will see how many of these strategies and technologies are just as useful for hybrid or in-person instruction as they are in the online-only world.

Like many of our recent courses, this session will take place in a somewhat hybrid format. That is, it will include aspects of both a traditional conference presentation as well as more collaborative and interactive group discussion. I look forward to learning from your experiences just as much as I am eager to share my own.

Robert Stephan, PhD, Associate Professor of Practice, Department of Religious Studies and Classics, College of Humanities, University of Arizona

Tracks: Online Faculty, Online Admin/Leadership, Online Instructional Designers

DAY 2: March 9, 2023
10:15AM – 11:15AM

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