Other recent guests have included Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen, whose recent movie focuses on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain, and Jason Rus

Other recent guests have included Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen, whose recent movie focuses on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain, and Jason Russell, creator of "Kony 2012," a viral video about the brutal Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony. "I'm not sure any of these things would have occurred without a class of 3,000 people," says Mr. Boyer, a senior instructor. "I totally can now foresee that this time next year we're going to get Barack Obama in the classroom, if not live, via Skype. It is a bit surpising that it has taken this long for such ideas about scaling in the classroom to really get mainstream attention. Population growth is an exponential function, so the sooner we can figure out how to efficiently adapt to the needs of large classes, the better.