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Adapting conventional delivery to cope with large cohorts: turning seminars into workshops

Teaching a hugely popular postgraduate political economy module to 50 international business students (mainly Chinese) had always gone well, based on lectures and seminars with assessment via a 3,000 word essay broadly capturing module content. But with a three times larger cohort in 2017 things went wrong. The innovation is to replace seminars with team-taught 2 hour workshops, fewer targeted readings and specific questions for groups to answer, plus a shorter more issue specific assessment. How will this go? The paper highlights problems with the traditional approach and speculates on whether the proposed changes will bring better outcomes.