Hybrid small class teaching: dividing and conquering large computer systems classes

Recent years have witnessed the rapid increase of undergraduate students in computer science majors. As a result, many computer science classes have reached hundreds of students, which may affect the quality of in-class teaching for some courses such as computer systems. This paper presents our approach in dealing with this issue with an approach we called hybrid small class teaching , which combines large class lectures with small class recitation, to increase the involvement of students and improve the performance of teaching. We have experimented this approach on an "Introduction to Computer Systems" course for the past five years with more than 20 professors involved each year. This paper presents our experiences and lessons learned through the experiments with hybrid small class teaching, as well as insights on how to deal with large classes in similar courses.