John Boyer has a unique message: gigantic classes can build an environment with tremendous sense of communities and connection, engage students, and turn them into excited, lifelong learners. For three years, he’s been experimenting and perfecting the process. See preview here

He has help with that, including one specialist in instructional technology, Katie Pritchard, and 3 TAs. He says that the students provide a lot of help for one another too.

He stumbled into teaching a super-sized class when his course in World Geography at Virginia Tech had a waiting list of 4700 students even though he taught in the largest classroom available with all 580 seats filled. He thought it would be just for one year while he cleared out the backlog. But he continued to have nearly 3000 sign up each year.

How does it work? With a lot of flexibility, including in what students do for their grades. They could take a number of multiple-choice tests, research and write or produce a video or other project, or any of a number of other options or combination of options.

Included is taking on the alter ego of any of the world leaders (political, spiritual, or other) and tweeting three times a day an appropriate tweet for that personality, their role, and what is on their agenda for that day. That’s what John calls a “shadow cabinet,” and those include figures like Plaid_Obama, Plaid_Pope, and Plaid_Putin. At the end of the semester, the instructor can look at all the tweets of that character. John says it’s like having a paper that takes a semester to write, one sentence at a time.

Turntable.fm is a tool he uses in the classroom to help build community – even though it doesn’t directly teach content. Students can share a song (has to be from another country and can’t be in English), and students vote it up or down, and if it’s catchy soon groups are dancing in the aisles of the performing arts hall where the class meets each week. Music connects people in ways that academic content rarely can.

You can demand big things when you teach big classes – and you should.

Boyer and his students learned that Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez were touring th e country in a bus to promote their movie, The Way, which was about a road in Spain that has been used by centuries of pilgrims – a subject that major studios refused to fund. Boyer used social media to reach out to the actors and invited them to present to his class – and they came! A remarkable experience for all involved.

In another extraordinary and serendipitous experience last semester, a Burmese student in his class who had only learned in that class of Burmese democracy activist and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi who had endured years of incarceration or house arrest for her activism. The student asked if the class could talk to her. Rather than thinking this was an impossible task, they started thinking how they could make it happen. Using contacts of the family and social media, they made a contact in Washington who  was able to get the message to the activist. The class ended up having a conversation via Skype with Aung San Suu Kyi, an experience that John says was life-changing for the students.

Next fall, Boyer believes the students can expect to talk to Barack Obama. He is counting on it. After all, why wouldn’t anyone want to talk to a huge group of such an important demographic?