Teaching large groups - resources to support you

As we begin the 2021/2022 academic year, we want to highlight the help and guidance available to colleagues who are teaching large groups of students.  We have collated key resources and other guidance that you may find helpful below; we will continue to add to these, and we would particularly like to hear from staff who have identified other resources as being useful to their practice. 

If you use, or have found, something that you think others could find helpful which does not appear on this list, please let us know on teaching.learning@manchester.ac.uk.

• Guidance from FSE on optimising Zoom settings for large group sessions (can be used in conjunction with the ITL guidance on transcription and captioning within the Accessible Teaching Content guide) 
• A case study from colleagues in FBMH on delivering online large-scale interactive teaching
• Guidance from Humanities on using Adobe Spark to deliver interactive lectures for large student cohorts
• A best practice toolkit from colleagues in Humanities on engaging large international cohorts
• Support on how to use online discussion boards more effectively from Dr Ralf Becker 
• Helpful 6 min video from Dr Nick Weise on flipped learning and how to structure synchronous sessions effectively to keep students engaged and help them to connect

Sector resources on large group teaching: 

• Teaching large groups (lectures) - University of Leicester 
• Large group teaching - UNSW Sydney
• Making lectures more effective and engaging - Future Learn
• Assessing large cohorts - Bristol Institute for Teaching and Learning 
• Teaching strategies and materials (includes links to other HEI resources on active learning in large lectures) - Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) 
• Colleagues have identified this twitter thread from September 2021 as having helpful resources and suggestions for teaching large groups