Making Students Active In Large Classes

Due to a shortage of lecturers, large classes (over 100 students) are very popular in Vietnam universities. Lecturers have to build up their own teaching techniques to handle large classes. Even though our school, the school of Information Technology, University of Science, Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh, is one of the top schools in Vietnam teaching computer science, there are still many classes which have more than 100 students.

In order to improve the teaching and learning quality, at the end of each academic year, we have organized a teaching and learning workshop in which lecturers have discussed and shared their teaching experience. One of the hottest topics in the workshop is how to make students active in large classes. There have been many techniques discussed. However, some are not very appropriate due to the fact that it is difficult and takes much time to prepare. In this paper, we will summarize techniques which are appropriate to large classes in Vietnam. In those techniques, some might be applied particularly for the field of Information Technology.

In the last couple of semesters, the techniques have been applied and monitored. According to different characteristics of the techniques, we classified them into 3 main groups: for individual activities, for peer work or group work, and for the whole class. According to the feedback from both students and lecturers, they are very interested in these new teaching and learning experiences.