NPR had a great summary of how physicists have been gathering data on how ineffective lecturing can be and how that time can be used more effectively: Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool. The link has a 8 min audio clip as well as the complete text of the article.
I don’t want to summarize it all because they explain it well, but I do want to quote the bottom.
Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don’t have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.
“It used to be just be the ‘sage on the stage,’ the source of knowledge and information,” he says. “We now know that it’s not good enough to have a source of information.”
Mazur sees himself now as the “guide on the side” – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.