I think it’s less time consuming once you get experienced with it, once you’ve seen all the pitfalls. Early on I spent a lot of time preparing, but it was due to lack of experience. Now I can kind of look at a problem, decide what it is strategically we want the students to learn: what is the learning objective, what are the possible things we can do. I have a repertoire of things we could do; the students are familiar with them. It takes, in fact, much less time now to prepare now than it would for a conventional lecture. A typical lecture, if I want to just scribble notes on a board, [I] figure about a three to one ratio. If I want fifty minutes, I had better have a hundred and fifty minutes for prep time, minimum. If I want to do something a little more polished, for example for a TV course, now the prep time is more like twenty to one. For every hour in the TV studio, I am probably prepping twenty hours. For a fifty-minute active learning session, now that I know what I am doing, probably less than an hour.

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