As OU grows toward its goal of 40,000 students, faculty are grappling with how to teach more students without diminishing the college experience.
This fall, 1,806 students are enrolled across four sections of Intro Biol: Molecule/Cell/Phys., according to OU’s ClassNav — three sections capped at 552 students each, and a fourth at 168.
Jeffrey Kelly, director of the School of Biological Sciences, wrote in an email to the Daily that the course opened with three lecture sections when enrollment began last spring, and a fourth was added over the summer to meet demand.
Few, if any, individual lecture sections at OU rival Intro Biol: Molecule/Cell/Phys., but this course isn't OU's largest by total enrollment. That distinction belongs to Principles-English Composition with over 2,000 students spanning 94 sections.
"Our freshman class has increased over the last six years, in size, by 45%, …" said OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. at the 2026 State of the University address. "We are going to hit 40,000 students this time next year."
But the university isn't done growing once it hits the 40,000 mark, Harroz said in an exclusive interview with the Daily.
“As we sit right now, we'd like to grow some more, …” Harroz said. “Maybe it's in that 7,100 range in a freshman class. The key is, you have to make sure that the experience you're providing for students doesn't diminish. ... The growth shouldn't be infinite; it should be purposeful.”
Across campus, departments have taken different approaches to managing that growth — from redesigning entry-level courses to automating grading almost entirely.
Intro Biol: Molecule/Cell/Phys.: An 'actively adapting' approach
Intro Biol: Molecule/Cell/Phys. was redesigned around 2019, combining what had been two separate introductory courses — one for majors and one serving as a general education option — into a single course, said Eric Lee, an associate professor who taught the redesigned curriculum.
"Based on the way the course is currently structured, it’s designed to be able to expand and contract depending on enrollment needs without causing disruptions," Lee said.
The course spans four lecture sections, with lecturers Tarren Shaw and Thayer Hallidayschult each teaching two. The pair, who have worked together for over a decade, meet weekly to keep the lectures synchronized and said they rarely teach the course the same way twice.
"I think a lot of what we talk about when we're not in the classroom is, ‘Wow, this is a lot of students. How can we make this the best possible experience for them?’" Shaw said on managing the large class size.
The course relies on 65 lab sections, staffed by 28 graduate teaching assistants and 24 undergraduate assistants, according to Kelly. Hallidayschult said the graduate assistants often build closer relationships with students than the lecture instructors do.
To keep lab grading consistent across that many assistants, instructors run weekly training sessions in which small groups of graduate assistants independently grade the same sample assignment, compare scores, then reshuffle into new groups to reconcile any differences.
A new change introduced last year schedules lab sections to align with students’ lecture sections, giving students a built-in study group. Shaw said the feedback on that change has been positive.
Both instructors said the course's size remains its most common complaint.
"The biggest complaint we get on our end-of-semester surveys is that the class is just too big," Shaw said. "But there's not anything we can do about that."
"Just because we're growing, that doesn't mean that the student experience can be diminished," Kelly said in a phone interview with the Daily.
Lee said the course's labs are split across buildings, requiring instructors to coordinate equipment and materials across spaces. Construction of the new Life Sciences Laboratories Building is underway and set to open in fall 2027.
All biology labs on campus will be effectively consolidated into the 105,000-square-foot facility, Harroz told Daily editors.
Computer-Based Information Systems: Built to scale
In the Management Information Systems department, the Computer-Based Information Systems course has taken a different approach. J.E.B. Sheriff, who has taught the course for nearly 10 years, said the department restructured the class around eight years ago to expand without straining instructors.
Faculty divided the curriculum into modules based on individual strengths, then reconverged to standardize homework, exams, and materials across all sections, Sheriff said. Every assignment is auto-graded using software chosen to work across both Apple and Windows devices.
"Of course, it’s (Management Information Systems) so we're going to automate as much as we can," Sheriff said, noting the subject matter itself lends the course to that kind of automation.
With grading and scale mostly solved, Sheriff said his focus shifted elsewhere.
"We're not worried about the scalability," Sheriff said. "We're worried about ensuring that the content that we're sharing is what the students need in the real world."
According to OU’s ClassNav, Sheriff's own section enrolls 268 students, supported by four to five teaching assistants who receive standardized training for teaching assistants across all Computer-Based Information Systems sections.
The course has six sections this fall; according to OU's ClassNav system three sections are capped at 268 students, two at 166 and one at 250, with all but one running nearly full. Four sections had fewer than five open seats as of Sept. 28, including Sheriff's own 268-seat section.
With traditional office hours impractical at that scale, the course relies on a shared inbox with teaching assistants and a walk-in “minute clinic.”
“‘It does not matter, that 125 to 275 (students). It's the same,’” Sheriff recalled a mentor once telling him. “‘It's all about that presentation, keeping them engaged.’”
That mindset has stuck with him since.
“There's not something where, like a pod, you know, 10 or 15 students,” Sheriff said. “It's always been a much larger (class).”
Accounting: Growth by the section, personal ease
Fundamental Financial Accounting in the Price College of Business has grown less uniformly. According to OU's ClassNav, the class has 14 sections this fall, eight of them in person — ranging from an honors section of 19 students to two large entry-level lecture sections of 275 students each, the latter both taught by Wayne Thomas.
Thomas said enrollment in his two sections has roughly doubled since he started teaching the classes 23 years ago. Unlike some colleagues, he said he doesn't find the scale burdensome.
“I'm a bit unique in that I love teaching that many students, so it’s not a burden to me,” Thomas said. “Getting to be with so many OU students is a wonderful experience.”
Thomas said the administrative workload, particularly email volume, has grown substantially, and it's harder to track individual student progress than in the smaller sections he once taught.
All exams and assignments in the course are now auto-graded, which he said limits the course largely to problem-based assessments.
Thomas said instructors meet regularly to keep sections aligned and he does not personally select or train his teaching assistants — they're assigned to him by the department.
“It's probably the case that some (teaching assistants) are better than others, just like some basketball players are better than others ... it is possible you would have inconsistency in what you're being told from a (teaching assistant),” Thomas said. He added that he hasn't personally run into major issues and tells students to report back if they're not getting the help they need.
He said enrollment sometimes outpaces planning, requiring faculty to teach overload sections or the department to bring in adjunct instructors.
“I do think it's putting pressure on certain colleges,” Thomas said, adding that his own experience — teaching in the same room, at the same section size, for more than two decades — isn't representative of every instructor's.
African and African American Studies: More instructors, less strain
Not every course has scaled the same way. Sharri Coleman, an adjunct professor who has been teaching in the College of African and African American Studies at OU for 20 years, said her in-person sections have grown only modestly over her teaching career from about 30 to 35 students.
Her online sections have grown more quickly; she increased one of her class sizes to 40 students over the summer to accommodate students’ shift toward online formats. Her two online sections this fall are capped at 35 and 40.
Introduction to African and African American Studies has 10 sections this fall — five in-person and five online — with in-person caps ranging from 18 to 35 students and online sections capped between 35 and 40, taught by six instructors, including Coleman.
The course has no teaching assistants at all — all grading falls to the professors themselves. Coleman said the growing size of her online sections has forced her to restructure how she grades — consolidating discussion posts and leaning more on auto-graded quizzes to keep her workload manageable.
Coleman said the course has largely avoided the strain seen elsewhere, because the department has enough faculty to offer multiple sections rather than funneling growth into one or two large ones.
“I think we have enough professors in (African and African American Studies) that we can have multiple sections,” Coleman said. “I think it might be a challenge for departments if you don't have those multiple sections ... then you might get a larger class.”
Across departments, OU faculty describe a common challenge answered in different ways.
Intro Biol: Molecule/Cell/Phys. has leaned on incremental redesign and coordination between a large teaching staff. Computer-Based Information Systems standardized and automated a decade ago to remove scalability as an ongoing concern. Fundamental Financial Accounting has absorbed growth by adding sections of varying sizes, with faculty experience differing by section size and instructor. Introduction to African and African American Studies has kept sections manageable in person while growth shifts largely online.
This story was edited by Macey Thaxton. Andrew Higgins, Brooks Davis, Kennedy Johnson and Larkin Bock copy edited this story.
