Instructors who teach large enrollment courses, or courses with more than 50 students, face special challenges compared to instructors who teach smaller classes. Due to the potential increase in the number of assessments and the pressure to expand class sizes beyond typical classroom capacity, these challenges are often magnified in large enrollment courses that are offered online. The most significant issues are primarily related to instructor workload and student support. In other words: How do you effectively instruct and support so many students without becoming overwhelmed?

Instructor Workload

Instructor workload is perhaps the biggest concern in all large enrollment courses, as each additional student on your roster increases the time and energy you'll need for providing feedback and supporting those students. Therefore, it is vital to consider your workload as you develop your assessment plan, create assignments, facilitate activities, and communicate with your students. If you already teach large enrollment courses face-to-face, then you are likely mindful of the workload associated with having 50 or more students in your course. These challenges increase in the online space, especially if you are trying to develop your course during the semester while also grading and interacting with your students.

Consequently, one key way to manage your instructor workload in a large enrollment online course is to develop as much of the course as you can before the semester begins. In addition, the more clear and student-friendly you can be in every facet of course development—from organizing the Canvas site, to clarifying course requirements and policies, to designing transparent assignment prompts and grading rubrics—the more this will facilitate smoother course delivery and answer questions about course logistics before they are even asked. Effective and early online course development thus allows you, during the semester, to devote more of your teaching time and energy to interacting with students, providing timely feedback, and staying on top of grading.

Use Large Enrollments to Your Advantage

Due to the considerable workload, large enrollment online courses pose some significant challenges related to grading load and student support. However, the number of students in the course also prompts us to ask: Is it possible to use large enrollments to your advantage in an online course? For example, consider the power of social media to gather data through crowdsourcing; the larger the audience, the more "crowd" you can source, and the more diverse and engaging responses you can receive. The same approach could be applied to large enrollment online courses. Online asynchronous discussions could be one useful method for soliciting student questions and ideas, and the number of posts would result in a wide spectrum of potentially beneficial responses.

Furthermore, because of the digital nature of the online modality, most online courses are very transparent; that is, one can easily see which students are completing the assignments and how well they are performing in the course. Canvas provides a great deal of useful data that can help you better understand the effectiveness of your course and the extent to which your students are being successful. In short, the analytics data within a Canvas course site provide potential advantages over what is available in a traditional F2F course.

Is it possible to use large enrollments to your advantage in an online course?

Manage Expectations about Large Enrollments

When teaching large enrollment courses, particularly in the online modality, it is important for students to understand what they can and cannot expect from you and/or your teaching assistants. For example, what will be the turnaround time for communicating or responding to student inquiries? How should they contact you? What will your grading process look like?

One thing to keep in mind is that students in large enrollment F2F courses can look around a lecture hall and see how many other students are sitting with them; by contrast, students in large enrollment online courses may be less aware of how many students are in the class and how that will impact you as the instructor. While you don't want to dissuade your students from contacting you when they need support, you do want to be clear that the number of enrolled students does impact the type of assessments and activities you can assign as well as how quickly you can respond to student inquiries.

Building a community of learners in online courses has been linked to increased student success. Doing so, however, can be particularly challenging in large enrollment online courses, where students can easily become "lost in the crowd."

Have Students Learn from Each Other

Finding ways that students can learn from each other is not only an effective pedagogical strategy but can also help reduce your workload as an instructor. In addition, peer-to-peer engagement helps to build a sense of community in the course that may continue beyond an individual assessment: when students work together on one project and have a positive experience, it becomes more likely that they will reach out to each other again in the future.

Many instructors use small group peer-learning activities in face-to-face classes, especially to deepen student understanding of how to apply or evaluate course concepts. For example, the instructor might ask students to work together to solve a problem, analyze a case study, or come up with "real world" examples that illuminate the concept students are studying. In a large enrollment online course, many such small group learning activities can be effectively translated into asynchronous online discussions. It's a good idea to make these into "group discussions" in which 10-15 students can engage in more in-depth conversation with each other. Canvas permits you to easily create students groups of this size (see more below) and then post a discussion prompt that will simultaneously appear in each group space.

Use Peer Review

Peer review, in which students provide feedback to each other on assignments or projects, can be another great way for students to learn from one another. One of the biggest advantages is that assignments linked to peer review are scaffolded to provide students with an opportunity for revision. Furthermore, students greatly benefit both from seeing examples of how other students have responded to the assignment prompt and from thinking critically about another student's work. Both of these exercises can help the student reviewer reassess and refine their own work. In other words, peer review often benefits the reviewer as much as the student being reviewed.

Peer reviews can be managed through Assignments or Discussions in Canvas. To make the most of this activity, provide clear instructions and questions for the review process. You may want to include a rubric for peer review and a mechanism for providing feedback about peer reviews. These additional measures to grade peer reviews do require some time and effort; nonetheless, grading peer reviews is often a more efficient process than commenting on an additional set of responses or essays in an early draft form. Meanwhile, the revisions students make in response to peer feedback usually result in a higher-quality end product being submitted for you to grade. So in addition to the learning benefits for students described above, peer review assignments may also positively impact your overall grading load.

Peer review often benefits the reviewer as much as the student being reviewed.

Put Students into Smaller Support Groups

Canvas allows you to divide students into smaller groups in your course site. Whenever you create a set of student groups in Canvas, this automatically generates a "mini course site" for each group—that is, an online space in which the group members can communicate and collaborate with each other. Often, these smaller student groups are used to manage online asynchronous discussions or facilitate group projects. Beyond that, in a large enrollment online course, it can be effective to place students into small groups and encourage them to use their Canvas group sites to connect with one another for support. For example, group members can schedule synchronous meetings or pose questions to each other by posting announcements in their group site. They can also share files or create group-specific online discussions for more extensive collaborations. You might consider requiring students to do weekly check-ins with their group mates to build connections, foster accountability, and help ensure that everyone is succeeding to the best of their abilities. Teachers and TAs have access to all small group spaces and can intervene if a particular student is struggling in the course despite the efforts of classmates.

While the Canvas group sites allow for asynchronous interactions, some students may find synchronous small group meetings even more helpful to their learning and shared peer support. To facilitate this, you could create a Collaborate Ultra open session for each student group, which would give the group a dedicated, secure, and flexible virtual space to gather synchronously when their schedules allow. Synchronous small group meetings provide additional ways for students to work together efficiently, to build a community of learners, and to prevent individual students from feeling "lost in the crowd."

Use Synchronous Sessions Sparingly and Strategically

Although it may be tempting to try to build community in large enrollment online courses through holding online synchronous class sessions, you should be aware that supporting a large number of participants in a synchronous session can be a significant challenge. Some students will inevitably encounter technical barriers (e.g. limited internet access or bandwidth, trouble with their computer audio , etc.) that prevent them from participating in the session. For this reason, it is important to always record synchronous sessions for later viewing and to provide alternative formats, such as online asynchronous discussion forums, for students to ask questions. Any required online synchronous sessions should be indicated in the schedule of classes and reiterated in the course syllabus so that students can plan accordingly.

While required synchronous sessions pose technical challenges—and even more so in large enrollment courses—you may find it fruitful to offer optional synchronous sessions for homework review or exam preparation. Synchronous sessions have the benefit of allowing questions to be asked and answered in real time, and when several students are in attendance, they can benefit from hearing each other's questions. In addition, synchronous meeting tools such as Collaborate Ultra permit the instructor to display a whiteboard or PDF or to share applications on their desktop. Such screen-sharing possibilities may facilitate the demonstration of certain processes, such as solving an equation or using a software application.