Research advances in learning and teaching over the past few decades provide a way to meet these challenges. These advances have established expertise in university teaching: a set of skills and knowledge that consistently achieve better learning outcomes than the traditional and still predominant teaching methods practiced by most faculty. Widespread recognition and adoption of these expert practices will profoundly change the nature of university teaching and have a large beneficial impact on higher education.

Explaining requires you to organize and elaborate on the ideas that you are trying to convey to your audience. Depending on your audience, you will have to provide more details and, thereby, engage in deeper processing of the information. On the other hand, if you are asked to simply retrieve ideas from a text, you may be less likely to engage in elaborate structuring or re-organization of the material – at least not to the same extent as preparing an explanation to someone else.

The "doer effect" is an association between the number of online interactive practice activities students' do and their learning outcomes that is not only statistically reliable but has much higher positive effects than other learning resources, such as watching videos or reading text.

Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process.

In prior work, we found that different student choices oflearning methods (e.g., doing interactive activities, reading onlinetext, or watching online lecture videos) are associated withlearning outcomes [7]. More usage in general is associated withhigher outcomes, but especially for doing activities which has anestimated 6x greater impact on total quiz and final examperformance than reading or video watching.