The reality is no one speaks up or you get like two people who speak up the entire class when the professor engages with the class. Sure active learning is best, but it requires a level of attention, alertness, and engagement that most students aren’t interested in stepping up for. Very few even take advantage of office hours even while struggling in the class. Maybe its from being burned out, maybe its from being tired, maybe its from being shy, whatever it is, teachers can’t exactly fix it and make people want to be active in class. It takes two.
All true. There are things teachers can do that help, but nothing is a silver bullet. One thing that I seldom hear discussed is classroom design. Lecture halls (the clue is in the name!) with fixed seating are death to seminar / "active classroom" techniques. As a professor, I would never try those in that layout; as a student, I'd down-vote an awkward attempt, too.
Tuition would have to go way up if they nixed the lecture. That class sponges up probably 6-8 TA sections worth of students 3x a week. So to staff that like they do in the 1x weekly section with your TA (about 20ish students per instructor) you need to hire probably 10x as many instructors, a lot more for some classes even. Money needs to come from somewhere for that.
