When I first heard of plans to renovate St. John Arena for use as an in-the-round lecture hall, my reaction was probably similar to yours: not a bad idea. After all, with stadium seating, good acoustics, four PowerPoint scoreboards and space for more than 13,000 students, the old basketball arena is a modern “technology classroom” in waiting. Triangle-shaped, stowable desks and wireless Internet will be installed later this quarter.

As you’ve likely read, our grand university is once again the grandest of them all, as evidenced by the 50,000 of you thirsting for knowledge among the buzz of campus construction equipment. Apparently the University of Texas is downsizing its Texas-sized student body in favor of smaller classes and closer student-faculty contact. Or perhaps it’s just a statistical fluctuation.

News of the St. John renovation made me realize just how difficult it is to wrap my arms around “50,000.” Are we in essence a Wal-Mart of higher education – the cheapest way to educate the most people with the least amount of effort? Or does OSU represent the ultimate optimization of the dissemination of knowledge, allowing huge quantities of students direct access to some of the brightest minds on the planet?

My feeling is that we’re somewhere in between, but a strong case can be made for the latter. As an example, the OSU chemistry department is ranked in the top 20 nationally, and this quarter 5,371 lucky students are enrolled in chemistry courses (1,600 in Chem 121 alone). That’s a lot of folks learning chemistry from top-notch chemists.

But what about the way in which we bring about that learning? In the example of Chem 121, those 1,600 students are herded into five lecture sections in mammoth McPherson 1000, distributed among three professors. Of those students, 672 are students of Prof. Patrick Woodward, a solid state chemist whose research in the optical and electric properties of oxynitrides and other semiconducting ceramics promises to eliminate bad smells in the air, according to his Web site.

His 672 students probably didn’t know that, which gets at the big question of the large-lecture format at research universities: Is it relevant that Prof. Woodward is an up-and-coming chemist on the research scene? Does it increase the amount of learning that takes place?

I believe lecture halls were first built to allow the most students an audience with prominent, time-strapped scholars in an era when lectures couldn’t be videotaped or posted on a Web site. Einstein would decide to lecture on gravitation at Princeton, and everyone wanted to hear it from the German’s mouth.

But somewhere along the way the purpose mutated into something different, and it continues to do so. Lecture halls are ever larger as schools grow and budgets shrink. Movie screens replace chalkboards to accomodate electronic media, and lights are dimmed to facilitate their viewing. Universities build so-called technology classrooms, with power outlets in the armrests and student voting devices at each seat.

This all concerns me. I’m midway between my years of sitting in lecture halls as a student and a career of teaching in them as professor, and I’m worried that students are being short-changed in the prevailing approach to “e-ducation” in our nation’s big universities. More than that, I’m worried that so much effort is put toward implementing new technologies without an equal effort to assess whether these advances increase learning. Do we know where we’re going, why we’re going there and what we’re giving up along the way?

Thursday I sat in the front row of Hitchcock 131 for Bus-MHR 400, a class of 472 students, to observe mass-learning firsthand. When I raised my arm with a question, ironically on the human need for recognition, Prof. Todor answered kindly. From that point forward, the professor seemed to be lecturing to me directly, with eye contact and gestures that showed a desire to connect with a student despite the size of the hall. And I realized that it isn’t just the students who might be missing something in our march toward technology-based education.

By the way, I should confess that, as far as I’m aware, no such plans to renovate St. John Arena exist. But I bet it didn’t seem that far-fetched to you.

Dan Magestro is a postdoctoral researcher in the physics department. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].