Presenting course content in a traditional form, such as lecturing (which is a time-honored teaching technique), offers an efficient method to present information to a large number of students but may result in students who listen passively. By implementing interactive course content, you begin utilizing the strategy termed deep learning (Marton and Saljo) which leads to a genuine understanding that promotes long- term retention of the learned material and as important, the ability to retrieve it and apply it to new problems in unfamiliar concepts.

Benefits of interactive course content create opportunities to:

• foster active engagement and accountability;
• promote student retention and learning of the material presented during lecture;
• give students practice in developing critical-thinking skills; and
• enable instructors to assess how well the class is learning that day.

Rather than having only individual students answer questions when called on, interactive techniques allow all students to participate. Research has shown that this engagement leads to deeper learning and retention.