One failure of the traditional face-to-face lecture is that it delivers learning content in large blocks—that is, in lengthy classes of normally 50–75 minutes. As Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski (2019) note, this violates the fundamental neurology of learning. When we learn, we first put information into our working memory, which resembles RAM memory in that it is not permanent. To make it permanent, we need to move it to our long-term memory, which is akin to a hard drive. This process requires pausing to think about the information.
