It should be a real knowledge -factory with a permanent presentation but there are some new technology such as flipping or mobile-learning. Your students will enjoy it believe me. Sometimes I have more than 250 students in a semester and I usually share them for smaller groups to make their learning more effective with their tablets or mobiles. 

If you are interested in, you can learn more about belended learning in this link:

http://www.sefi.be/conference-2013/images/211.pdf

Dear Agnes

Thank you very much

Start a parallel campus. (Needs investment $$!) Otherwise shift to lab work in the morning plus afternoon. (Needs extra support staff). Switch to mixed teaching (Using some E-learning de-loads the campus.)

Divide your class in small group and give case studies prior to class, and discuss the same in next class. This will encourage students participation and whole lecture become more interactive. This will maintain quality of teaching in spite of large group of students.

Limit intake to 200 by taking in the best students. Double up somehow on resources. (Not easy).

Hi all, 

We are doing most of what you proposed (except for E-learning). 

In fact the student are divided into 4 sections (for courses) each section has 2 groups for recitation and 4 subgroups for labs and special courses like CAD, computer programming and languages. 

We are also doing a lot of case studies (small teams of 4 to 6 students who work on a mini project and submit it at the end of the semester, each student will have at least 2 to 3 mini project per semester). 

We are using labs in morning and afternoon as well as classrooms.

In fact our problem is first a lack of equipement (labs), then a lack of classrooms (8 classrooms for 4 years, each year with 3 to 4 sections), and finally a lack of staff.

What we need is really new differents ways of transmitting knowledge to students.

Hopefully at the end of the first year we keep only 60 to 70% of students (the best ones). So for the second to fifth year we have only 3 sections.

Thank you very much for your advises

Best regards

Let management know about your problems so they can help you with resourcing.

After all, you are bringing in a lot of student fees, and will being in more. Management will be sympathetic when you show them this viewpoint!

Hi Ian

Thanks for the advise. In fact it is a bit more complicated. In our country (Algeria) students don't pay fees. So more student at short term will not bring more money (the long term is different, because the governement funding of the university depends on the number of students, but this will take years to be effective).

I have already expose the problem to the management staff (even to the president of the university) I had many help (all they can) but not enough.

Thank you all for being interested in this problem

Best regards

The theory notes, assignment sheets, lab manual must be given to the students in advance. They are expected to read before they come to class or lab. 

One has to appoint more persons as tutor or teaching assistants responsible for checking the assignment sheets, lab records and quizzes.  They can be students of higher classes and they too needs a training as how to strengthen the learning process of the younger students.

Hi Rakesh

Thanks for the advises

Best

Today Distance learning with the help of technology is helping teachers and students worldwide..although IMHO physical face time is important .. the optimum would seem

to be a judicious mix ...some suggestions (all FOSS ) below...

1. https://moodle.org/  

2. audacity  Audacity(R): A Free, Cross-Platform Digital Audio Editor

WWW: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

3 Online Courses and Programs

Learning to Teach Online

COFA Talks Online

Online Research at COFA

.http://online.cofa.unsw.edu.au/  is also a very instructive site

..hope it is useful..

 Cheers

It is simple; quality of teaching is inversely proportional to the number of students. If you are bound to take more than your capacity then divide the class into two groups and engage more staff (probably your colleague or one of the best students who have completed the course) with alternate theory and lab schedules.   

If you can't do anything about limiting admissions to your class, I would suggest a change in the delivery method. As someone pointed out earlier, there are many support technological resources. How you use them is the key.

I encourage you to look at a combination of class inversion, team based learning and project based learning. I'm implementing a class based on this techniques this semester, and this seems to free-up time of the instructor from low level learning objectives and allow him to focus on the higher level learning objectives. In this way, you can still offer high quality education to a large number of students. However, the challenge is implementing the techniques in such a way that the students are engaged. It requires a lot of work to set up a class this way, but given that yours if offered anually, it might work in your benefit as you only have to set it up once and from there on just improve it.

Hope this helps a little.

Thanks all for your advises, comments and suggestions

Best

@Ronald Y. Barazarte: If you can't do anything about limiting admissions to your class, I would suggest a change in the delivery method.

The MIT model works well in solving this problem.    The basic idea is to make all lecture notes freely available on the web.    So, even if you cannot attend a particular class (no matter where you are), you can download a copy of the notes of interest to you:

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

Notice the online books that are available from MIT.    See, for example, the online books on mathematics that are accessible:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/online-textbooks/#mathematics

Dear James, 

Thank you for your advise, we are using the web for some material but not a lot. I will advise all my colleague to post their course on the web.

Thanks again.

You have an untenable inequality: capacity < demand and all the advice has addressed the possibility of increasing capacity.  However, under the assumption that capacity has (now or at some future time) already been maximized subject to the constraints of available resources and quality of teaching), one is still faced with the question of determining criteria selecting which students, up to the capacity, should then be accepted to the program. 

Of course one wishes to utilize resources most effectively and to obtain additional resources as needed, but it may be impossible, even then, to handle the entire demand and capacity becomes an inelastic constraint.  Treating the resulting decision problem is inescapable and should be modeled as a constrained optimization problem.  This is a situation in which more care must be given to proper modeling of the function to be optimized than to its technical solution.  [At this point I draw attention to the question without now trying to answer it.

A good point has been raised by Thomas I. Seidman regarding demand..but

it is not convincing that only capability of student can be the criteria..and someone determines it.."self actualization " is a much more powerful force and can only be

determined by the student...in effect there will be a natural attrition with the

method suggested by James F Peters.further...this will prevent that one student

 who may "seem" to have impediments from being lost..maybe a " Steve Jobs"

or a " Beethoven"  who may bring a lot to the field..

Cheers

Hi all, 

First, thank you for you interest in our problem. What we have decided is to give a maximum ressources (staff and equipment) to the 251 freshmen students. At the same time, we are going to limit the access to the second year (we did not yet decide how). Presently our second year student are about 120, and we are able to deal with. 

What do you think? how can we make selection without missing good students?  (the problem is that first year contain mainly general courses that do not deal with manufacturing engineering).

As far as I can tell, you already have a good idea as to the students you would like to graduate, although this has not been formulated explicitly.  The difficulty seems to lie in evaluation.  I know I would prefer a student who knows nothing except how to learn to a student who has memorized all the books and understands nothing.  Insight, perspective and persistence seem most important, but test grades (the most easily available data) do not seem to correlate very well with these.  It is a difficult problem!

i agree completely with Thomas I. Seidman ..

Cheers

You pointed out the real problem, I don't think that grades are the best way. Unfortunatly we do not have alternatives!

A very brief comment:  One possibility is using a 2-stage process in which a larger cohort is provisionally accepted to the program and the first semester (or year...) is used for in situ evaluation as well as instruction.  This would necessitate ordering the instruction sequence so part of that time is devoted to activity conducive to the desired evaluation.

Thanks for your comments.

In fact, we are collecting attendence data in labs recitation and even some course, if a student has a lot of absences, he or she can be excluded. So most of student try to have regular attendance. To evaluate student motivation, we are using mini-projects, but this is done in teams, so some of the students can be well evaluated because they are in a good team eventhough they did not do anything. We are asking for auto-evaluation inside teams, it works but not always. 

we have presently 250 students in the first year, we want that only half of them pass to the second year. We know that grades do not give the best evaluation (although we are evaluating exams, quizzes, labs and lab test, mini project, homeworks...). Our fear is to miss good students in this first year filter!

Hi Nane, 

thanks for your comment.

First we do not want to drop 50% of our students. we have to. In fact we are obliged to accept all student who are sent to us. We ask for 100 and we receive 250. We do not have the capacity to handle all these student (you can go through the beginning of the discussion of this question to have more information). 

We are not doing so many test. we have one exam at the end of the semester and on lab test. All the rest of evaluation is performed on the daily work of student. We seldom use quizzez eventhough it is done sometimes. for homeworks they deals with the recitation exercices. So it is done to make students prepare their recitation.

Actually, your proposal is very different from what we are doing. I will discuss it with my colleagues. But I am not sure that it can work on our students because of our environnement and culture. First our student arrive to our institution very young (from 17 to 19). Second students do not pay any tuition fees, they have almost free accomodation and meals. My fear is that they just think that they are on a long vacation if we do not control their attendance. But anyhow maybe your system can work. Thanks again

Hi Nane, 

You are right, maybe it might work. I will discuss with my colleagues and maybe try it.

Thanks again

Many of the advises given seemed reasonable.  Mostly agree with a good design based on local culture and situation of the following straegies: project based learning, flipped classroom, e-learning and collaborative learning.  Student engagement is the critical factor imho, however, instructor dynamics and presence (either virtual or face to face) also important.  Over the years I have found out that is way more important to foster self learning and collaborative learning in students than actual technical content.  With proper guidance for self improvement and networking anyobe can advance in a fast pace changing by the minute world.  Just my 2 cents.

I launched this question few months ago and tried to use all answers to find the best way for evaluation.

Until now I did not find the best way!

We planned to graduate 50% of the students which seems to be the average rate of our faculty. But I am still not convinced by this and continue to believe that their should be better ways for evaluation. 

So I am re-opening the discussion. Please share your thaughts.