In that article I just linked to, Harvard Physics Professor Eric Mazur notes that the lecture course has become obsolete–in no small part, of course, thanks to the internet. Now that information is so widely available, the classroom is no longer as valuable as it once was when it comes to simply imparting information: “Ever since the Middle Ages, the primary vehicle for conveying information was the lecture, but this is the 21st century.”

The internet has created an opportunity for the classroom to be re-imagined, and one way of re-imagining is to incorporate more doing, less telling.

Dr. Tim Lahey, Associate Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, echoes Mazur’s points. As the head of the school’s curriculum redesign, he told Mind/Shift that one of his main goals is to incorporate more interactive work: “Our students can access lots of information really efficiently now online, probably more efficiently than we could ever relay it, so the added value of interactions with faculty should be talking through difficult concepts, refining difficult decision-making, and otherwise doing the challenging stuff that can’t be done with a laptop or phone.” Lahey says it’s clear to him that students working together in small groups produces superior outcomes to lecturing.