I also agree that there seem to be competing strains of reasoning from the edu-pundits, to the point where I sometimes wonder whether they read not only each others’ work, but the column/blog post they wrote last week, or yesterday. On the one hand, we hear about MOOCs and making education accessible and affordable (and/or profitable) and crowd-sourcing and such. On the other hand, the talk is all about flipped classrooms and the death of the lecture and student engagement, which tends to boil down, when one looks closely at it, to giving students a chance to work, alone or in small groups, on exercises that allow them to apply concepts and practice skills, with the instructor who designed the exercises, or someone at least equally knowledgeable, close by to answer questions and provide guidance as needed (and, presumably, use the information gained from the process to design/tweak the next exercise, and/or the next iteration of the course). For someone who has managed to teach for several decades without talking for more than 15 minutes at a stretch (well, give or take a few class “discussions” that turned into near-monologues), the “death of the lecture” stuff is a bit puzzling, and amusing. And all of the ideas for increasing engagement sound great, if unsurprising and not exactly new. They also sound labor-intensive, which is just fine — unless, of course, one is expecting any of this to be cheap and/or profitable. It’s not, any more than building a solid, durable bridge or highway or subway system is, but infrastructure — in this case, human capital — is well worth its cost.