I beg to differ. Teaching 10 students and teaching 200 students is entirely different, in ways that preclude solution by the means you are referring to. With 10 students you can be constantly accessible to everyone, you can conduct joint discussions, know the students personally, cater to their specific problems, and overall make the learning experience more beneficial to all. With 200 students you can't make useful discussions interactive, because people constantly get in each other's way, you have a limited time to answer questions, if at all, you cannot know all students personally, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, this is different for different lecturers, some lecturers can easily handle 200 students, but will certainly falter at 400, or even 300, it depends on the lecturer, though _always_ the active participants will be in a minority when you have more than a few half-dozen students.
I talk, of course, only of my experience as a student, rather than as a teacher. But that has been my experience, when comparing classes with various amounts of students and various amounts of resources. Yes, greater halls, air conditioning, coputer-connected projectures, they can all help the learning experience. But they cannot compensate for the problems caused by too large a student per lecturer ratio.
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