I'm going to have to disagree. Here's my default article I turn to on the matter - http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-a

I'm going to have to disagree. Here's my default article I turn to on the matter - http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-lose-the-lecture-as-teaching-tool http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l... . The problem, up until the advent of MOOCs, was there was no incentive for higher education to improve. Prices go up every year, more instruction is dumped on post-docs and adjuncts instead of professors, but the number of people going to college continues to increase. Why improve your product if people keep buying it regardless? And this idea of active learning is nothing new. Maria Montessori did extensive research on effective teaching methods more than a hundred years ago and moved more and more heavily to small projects and physical interaction as the most effective means of instruction. http://www.infomontessori.com/sensorial/visual-sense-binomial-cube.htm http://www.infomontessori.com/sensorial/visual-sense-binomia... I happen to like the binomial cube as an example, because it takes a confusing, "just memorize FOIL" type of concept and turns it into something you can directly interact with to develop a much clearer understanding. And of course, there's things like this: https://xkcd.com/1356/ https://xkcd.com/1356/ Or the explorable explanation that was on the front page the other day about game theory and trust: http://ncase.me/trust/ http://ncase.me/trust/ Or Brett Victor's classic Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ The ability to interact with a model blows traditional educational methods out of the water as far as gaining serious understanding (imo), and I expect this type of instruction to only grow in importance as time goes on.