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Mr. Mazur wondered whether lecturing was an ethical teaching choice.

a lecture is only as passive as the listener

Students learn when they think about what they’re hearing and organize it into salient points. "This places the responsibility for learning on the student,

modern zeitgeist places the responsibility on the instructor.

Lecturing, he says, serves another important purpose. It reaffirms the importance of expertise and allows students to see how an expert role-models the process of working through a problem.

Learning is not a spectator sport,"

Lectures are inexpensive for institutions, allowing hundreds of students to be assigned to one faculty member.

Mr. Mazur often likes to cite education research suggesting that students overestimate how much they learn from a smoothly delivered lecture.

The lecture creates the perfect illusion

Students read material before class on an online platform

Students post comments on the reading and respond to one another’s annotations

comments drive the next class.

o answer each problem, students do four things: articulate the problem in their own words, devise a plan to answer it, execute it, and evaluate how well it worked.

omplete the problem sets alone before class and work in teams during it to correct errors

not graded on how correct their answers are but on their effort and their accuracy in judging how well they understood the problem.

udents do complete five hourlong "Readiness Assurance Activities" during the semester. In the first half-hour they solve the problems alone; they can consult the internet but not one another. In the second, they go over the problems again, this time with their teams. Their scores reflect individual mastery and collective contribution.

Project-based learning is the center of the new course. Students work in teams. Many projects have low-stakes competitions attached to them, like constructing the most secure safe by using magnets as locks. Other projects have an explicit social benefit, like building musical instruments for an orchestra for poor children in Venezuela.

Mr. Mazur has moved himself far offstage; he missed about 40 percent of the meetings this past semester. Class just rolls on without him.

Peers, Mr. Mazur says, are a far greater source of motivation than a professor.

His syllabus dedicates two paragraphs to the virtues of failure

They should see failures, he writes, as "learning opportunities, not negatives, as steppingstones to success."

Repeated failure, as he has learned, is necessary for success.