Learning Community Expansion

I wouldn’t mind the expansion of our learning community from 30 students to 45 students. This would still allow the students of the learning community to get to know each other and work together. Another English class might be needed for the extra students, but the learning community can accommodate one more class into the collaborative course structure. With this amount of students, the learning community events would still be small scale, which would make it easy for students to interact with each other socially. In fact, I think expanding the learning community to accommodate another 15 students would be very beneficial for everyone. It would allow more students the opportunity to join a learning community, and it would allow students to get to know a wider range of new people.

Increasing the learning community size to about 120, however, would have many issues. Even though the students would be put into groups to maintain the “community” sense during Engineering 103, the overall number of students will make Engineering 103 feel exactly like Engineering 131, or any other class for that matter. Students like the feeling that they can get to know their teachers and that the teachers can get to know them. This is nearly impossible with a class size of nearly 120. Events for the Global Engineering Learning Community would become no more than a mass gathering of students, which will greatly reduce the options of what events can be planned. It would be difficult to have 120 students go bowling all at once or play billiards all at once. I don’t even think PMU’s Rack ‘n Roll can accommodate that many students even if half went bowling while the other half played billiards. The purpose of learning communities is to provide students with a social network that has a foundation in classes that are shared where student-student interaction is possible.