A corporate organizational model for scaling class size

Many institutions are facing increasing enrollment in engineering and growing class sizes. This shift puts a strain on course management, resources, and quality student learning. Each institution of higher education has a different approach to dealing with large enrollments and the process for scaling a successful course will be different at each institution. Scaling approaches range from building MOOCs, to simply cloning courses, and to more complicated hierarchies of teaching assistants, instructors, and course coordinators. While the actualization of these approaches will differ by institution and are shaped by institutional needs and resources, there are a small set of basic course models that are utilized. Each of these models has benefits and challenges specific to its structure and will be common across institutions. In this paper we utilize a corporate development model to discuss the benefits and challenges faced by each of different scaling models. The goal is to build a framework and common language by which faculty from different institutions can dialog about their challenges and successes and build on the lessons learned from other institutions. This paper was developed by a workgroup at the 2016 National Academies of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education workshop. The goal of this paper is to open a dialog of how to continue to have rich and inclusive undergraduate engineering education at larger and larger classroom scale. We believe that this is an important and pragmatic conversation for many faculty in improving undergraduate teaching.