Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about a revolutionary new way of teaching called the Active Learning Initiative

with a special guest from Cornell University.

We'll also answer a listener question about how airplanes deal with lightning.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

A breakthrough in higher education could be paving the way towards a new future for learning.

Cornell University has been implementing a program called the Active Learning Initiative

and the results have been incredible according to today's guest Julia Tom Levy.

She's the Vice Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell University and a professor in

the Department of Physics and she's all in on this new approach to teaching

even though she admits she was quite skeptical at first.

Here's what she told us about the active learning initiative.

It was pitched to me because I was one of the professors teaching large introductory, you know, freshman courses to non-major.

So I was at the time teaching a course for 400 engineering majors and they all have to take physics.

So the pitch was, you know, there's mounting research over the last five to ten years that there are better ways to teach these courses

than we're teaching them traditionally. The research says that people learn

best if they're directly engaged, if they're doing things themselves,

if they talk a lot and are engaging in problems and are getting rapid feedback,

and that's not the way I was teaching.

So I was interested because it was very convincing research.

...