"You have to read the newspaper, too, if you read Scripture," said Felipe Miando, a truck driver who recently enrolled in the class.
The huge theater-style classroom where the lecture was held was filled with students, some of whom were not enrolled in the class.
Almost 200,000 students have enrolled in the class, which is the company's introductory computer science offering, and its most popular, Mr. Stavens said.
Those recruits enrolled in the class will have to wait until at least October to begin their training as part of a 27-member class, well below the 48-person limit.
Here's how it would work: A teacher would pick a textbook, and the college would pay a negotiated fee to the publisher based on the number of students enrolled in the class.
"She was to come to my graduation this year," said Mustafa, 17. "She said, 'I want to see you graduate in America.' " Mrs. Khalil's husband, Samir Alsalihi, 63, a visiting professor at Binghamton University, said his wife of 31 years had a passion for learning and had enrolled in the class to improve her English and socialize with people from other cultures.
The final sample contained 692 surveys, which was 64.2% of the students enrolled in the classes in which the survey was administered and 30.3% of the students enrolled in all 50 classes.
As there was no interaction, this difference also applied to the Fall 2011 control group, and may result from differences in the kind of students enrolled in the classes taught by the two instructors based on other scheduling considerations.
First to eighth graders were included in the study, and the total numbers of the students enrolled in the classes were 74, 60, 70, 72, 72, 107, 104, and 81 students, respectively.
