Engaging students and maintaining quality in the era of massification: strategies and approaches for teaching large first-year courses

ABSTRACT

This article examines the nature of first-year international relations (IR) teaching in Australia. Cost pressures in the university sector have been met by economies of scale with foundational classes becoming very large, often with hundreds of students. The article critically reflects on current strategies for teaching these courses to meet the challenge of providing an engaging and high quality learning environment in large classes with widely fluctuating student entry scores, university preparedness, and educational capital and language competence. The article argues that a successful approach to improving the quality of first-year IR teaching and to accommodating the diverse learning needs of all students is to run these courses in multiple streams, with one dedicated to providing a richer, more active IR learning experience. In the era of ‘massification’, allowing students a level of guided autonomy in aligning their learning preferences with teaching methods is likely to increase engagement and motivation, thereby improving retention and degree progression.

本文研究了澳大利亚第一年国关教学的性质。大学成本的压力通过规模经济来解决，即基础班级便得很庞大，往往多达百人。作者反思了在现行大班、学生入学成绩、准备情况、教育资本、语言能力等方面都参差不齐的情况下，如何保证高质量学习环境的授课方式。作者认为，提高第一年教学质量、适应所有学生不同学习需求的成功方式在于，课程多管齐下，其中之一要提供更丰富更生动的学习经历。在大众化时代，在学习倾向和教学方法上给予学生一定自主性，可以让他们更投入更积极，从而也提高在读率和加快学位过程。

KEYWORDS:

• Active learning
• learning styles
• massification teaching
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Samantha Mahood for research assistance and my colleagues Robyn Hollander and Cosmo Howard for suggesting points developed in the article. Thanks also to Susan Engel, Diane Zetlin, Lucy West and three anonymous peer reviewers for useful comments on earlier versions. Any errors remain the responsibility of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dan Halvorson is a senior lecturer in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University.