How I Got to Know My 200 Students (Almost) Overnight

Direct interaction between students and their teacher is an essential component of effective teaching. Unfortunately, this component is often absent in large classes. On one hand, lecture periods and office hours offer insufficient opportunities to interact with large numbers of students. On the other hand, electronic communication, such as e-mail or web-based forums quickly become an intractable burden on the teacher. This past year, with the support from the NSF, we developed an effective and efficient system allowing asynchronous communication between students and teacher. The system helps the teacher to get to know large numbers of students quickly and to respond to their individual needs. In addition it helps the students learn outside the classroom. The system is also directly applicable to distance learning.