Jennifer Widom (db-class) From 100 Students to 100,000

Typically I teach around 100 students per year in my introductory database course. This past fall my enrollment was a whopping 60,000. Admittedly, only 25,000 of them chose to submit assignments, and a mere 6500 achieved a strong final score. But even with 6500 students, I more than quadrupled the total number of students I've taught in my entire 18-year academic career.

The story begins a couple of years earlier, when Stanford computer science faculty started thinking about shaking up the way we teach. We were tired of delivering the same lectures year after year, often to a half-empty classroom because our classes were being videotaped. (The primary purpose of the videotaping is for Stanford's Center for Professional Development, but the biggest effect is that many Stanford students skip lectures and watch them later online.) Why not "purpose-build" better videos: shorter, topic-specific segments, punctuated with in-video quizzes to let watchers check their understanding? Then class time could be made more enticing for students and instructor alike, with interactive activities, advanced or exotic topics, and guest speakers. This "flipped classroom" idea was evangelized in the Stanford C.S. department by Daphne Koller; I was one of the early adopters, creating my videos during the first few months of 2011.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~widom/SigmodBlog/