A recent rise in undergraduate enrollment in the DU Biology Program and increasing class sizes has faculty adding more sections of courses, increasing department hires, exploring new teaching methods and re-evaluating current standards of undergraduate education in the sciences.

According to Professor Jim Fogleman, former Dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, several freshman biology classes are now taught two or three times per day because there are over 200 students interested in taking them.

Joseph Angleson, Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, said the department has seen steady growth in the past decade, but the growth has increased rapidly in the past three to four years.  Increases in student enrollment during this period have reached up to 20 percent per year.

Fogleman says this increase should not, however, result in restrictions on enrollment or second applications like those currently required by the Daniel’s College of Business.

“Part of the reason the business school did that was to try to ensure a higher quality student in the program.  I’m not sure that we have that sort of problem in biology,” said Fogleman.  “I can’t imagine that we would put a restriction on science majors.  That would be objectionable to any science faculty member.”

Still, Angleson says the increase in enrollment has impacted class sizes.

“Where it’s most noticeable is in the intro classes—intro science classes, whether it be in biology, chemistry or physics, at any university tend to be big relative to that university,” said Angleson.

Classes at DU are capped at 100 students.  One of the reasons for this number, according to Angleson, is that DU has very few rooms on campus that can support classes of that size.  To stay within this limitation, the biology department has started offering multiple lecture sections, especially for introductory level courses, which has helped the department keep introductory-level class-size averages to 60-70 people.  Angleson cites these relatively small class sizes, even for introductory-level classes, as an important factor in helping professors get to know their students and keeping their classes engaged.

“Our big is still small, relatively,” said Angleson.  “Our goal is constantly to provide a really good experience for science majors here, and that includes keeping class sizes down.”

Maintaining this standard is not always easy, as Angleson has found during his time as chair of the Department of Biological Studies.  Every quarter during advising week, Angleson spends the entire week solving scheduling conflicts and managing the department’s enrollment.  One common challenge is unexpected demand for courses.

This can increase the number of lab sections needed for that course, which then requires both additional lab space and the use of additional resources such as Teaching Assistants.  Additionally, since biology majors are required to take several chemistry classes, these scheduling challenges extend across departments as well.

Angleson says that rearranging schedules to accommodate student needs, a common occurrence at DU, does not often happen at larger schools, where students can get up to a year behind due to scheduling conflicts.

“We don’t ever want science majors to get locked out of a class.  We really try to accommodate them,” said Angleson.
This is not, however, the department’s only challenge.  According to Angleson, the goals of solving scheduling problems and offering more sections of introductory-level courses to keep class sizes down have to be balanced with keeping upper-level classes small and allowing time for independent student and faculty research.

“We really do try to do it all.  We want to give the absolute best experience for the undergraduates and at the same time we want to let the faculty do their research, so it is a balancing act,” said Angleson.

The only way to accomplish all of these goals, says Angleson, is to grow.  Therefore, the department currently has on-staff four lecturers and 18 tenure-track faculty members in biology, and is currently searching for an additional tenure-track professor.  Lecturers focus exclusively on teaching, while tenure-track professors are responsible for both teaching and research and are expected to secure outside grants for that research.  While it is a big investment in terms of both time and money to hire tenure-track faculty, Angleson says this option is considered the better of the two by administrators in the department.

“We very much prefer tenure track hires because those are the people that do research,” he said.  “Undergraduates can really benefit from that because that means the person teaching their classes is literally, by definition, an expert in the field.”

According to Angleson, the research experience of faculty is especially important in the smaller and more discussion-oriented upper-level classes, although he emphasizes that the quality in teaching should not change based on the faculty member.

“Hopefully from the undergraduate student perspective, it’s not that different, because hopefully we have a quality teacher regardless of what their rank is,” said Angleson.

Looking to the future, Angleson says he expects interest in science to continue to grow both at DU and across the country, although not necessarily at the same high rates the department has seen recently.  This, in turn, means that additional accommodations and adaptations will have to be made within university science departments.

He said one way he expects to see this happen is through changes in class structures.  Hybrid teaching technologies, in which a course is taught through a combination of traditional face-to-face lectures and online supplemental activities, are already being tested at DU in pilot studies.

What Angleson does not expect to see is change in the role of professors in universities.  He says that for universities such as DU to continue to say they are research institutions, they have to keep tenure-track faculty on staff to conduct research.

“There’s definitely going to be change.  It’s hard to say what, but the role of the teacher and the researcher, as long as the university wants to remain a research institution, isn’t going to disappear,” said Angleson.

Angleson also says he does not expect the quality of teaching and research, opportunities available to students, and student experiences in courses to change.

“All of these things that DU really prides itself on, we’re still trying to accommodate, even as we’re growing pretty rapidly,” said Angleson. “I think for the most part we’re doing a good job of accomplishing that.”

UPDATED, MARCH 11, 2013 6 P.M. BY ANITA BALAKRISHNAN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: A sentence fragment, “ing and research, opportunities available to students, and student experiences in courses will change,” was removed from the end of the online version of this story because its repetition was due to clerical error.