“Large class sizes make it infinitely more challenging for college instructors to connect and communicate with individual students. This might not be a big issue if professors have an army of teaching assistants running smaller tutorial groups, but that’s not always the case; in my courses, for example, hundreds of students meet in a single learning space for a weekly lecture or webinar. As in online classes of any size, having a massive group of students in a single location creates the real risk that students will feel anonymous and disengaged due to a lack of meaningful interaction with their professor and peers.”
“The key to effective socialized course design lies in understanding and configuring the LMS as not (just) a content delivery mechanism for distributing grades and PDFs but also as a potentially valuable niche online networking platform that can support a series of socialized assignments.”
via Using the LMS as a Social Network in a Supersized Course | EDUCAUSE.edu.