Utilizing the World Wide Web and the Internet to facilitate learning in large classes

Teaching large classes is often a difficult and unwelcome assignment. A majority of large universities offer a portion of their required freshman classes in lectures of a hundred or more students. There are several problems that a professor must deal with in teaching a large class that are not commonly encountered in small classes. This paper addresses some of these issues, suggests improvements and solutions, and shows some of the results obtained at Purdue University. The Internet and the World Wide Web have proven to be two tools available to instructors to improve communications, shorten response time to questions, and increase overall learning. These tools can be utilized to facilitate communication between the instructional staff and standardize grading and information sharing practices between the staff. In particular, we have utilized network information sharing capabilities to post lecture notes, programs and old exams, as well as provide answers to submitted questions for student use. We have also used this medium to provide teaching assistants with answer keys for assignments and exams. These approaches, which have been tested on over 3000 students, have resulted in a greatly improved student performance on the exams and their perception of the course