Making A Large Class Small

As budgets shrink and class sizes grow, educators are hard pressed to maintain quality in their classrooms. At Berkeley, the class size of our required undergraduate mechanical engineering courses has ballooned from 40-60 students per professor up to the current level of 130-170. Although less than the 500-600 students that routinely fill introductory chemistry courses, 160-odd students certainly would seem to mandate that what once was (at least potentially) an interactive forum, must perforce become a purely lecture based recital. The question to be addressed is “Can such an alteration be avoided?” Can an indisputably large class be approached in such a way as to preserve the feel of a smaller class without driving the professor insane at the same time? This question is not a new one [1], [2] and it is hoped that the current paper may add a bit to the existing knowledge base.