Alison Wong and I gave a teaching seminar at UNSW on teaching at scale.
The seminar was held on Wednesday 29 April 2026. We spoke about the practical systems we use to support large cohorts while keeping students engaged and maintaining a consistent learning experience.
Abstract
Teaching at scale is a major challenge in our context, with some units regularly enrolling more than 500 students and reaching over 1,500 at their largest. This is, of course, not a challenge unique to us. In this seminar, we will share a range of strategies we have developed to support teaching at scale while fostering student engagement and maintaining a consistent learning experience.
We will discuss how we use active learning to engage students in lectures, how we deploy additional teaching staff in tutorials to support diverse ability levels and manage large class sizes, and how we approach marking at scale. This includes the use of Gradescope for assignment marking as well as the organisation of in-person exam marking sessions. We will also explore how we teach programming effectively at scale using the Ed platform.
Although these strategies were developed in response to very large enrolments, they have also proven effective in smaller units of around 50 students and in moderately sized classes of around 200. By sharing our practices, we hope to offer practical teaching strategies that can be adapted across a wide range of disciplinary and class contexts.