A Different Kind of Learning: Neurochemistry at Concordia

I am a senior at Concordia College in Moorhead, and I am just finishing up my approximately 30th college class at Concordia. I can honestly say this class was different from all of the others. It was different in the way we learned the information. Instead of one person telling everyone else what to know, we worked together to figure out the answer.
For example, we read about autism a couple of weeks ago. Instead of our professor teaching us all that she knows about autism, we read an article explaining what it is and we came to class with questions of our own that we wanted to know. For the next class day we were assigned a topic or question that someone in the class had, and we basically had to find all the information we could on that topic. We would then present the information to our classmates that next class day. By the end of that day we would make sure that everyone was on the same page as far as understanding what autism is and what the paper we read was trying to say. Our professor would help facilitate us, and she would also have a topic of her own to describe to the class. Then on the third day of that week, we would discuss with each other about what autism is and what we can do to help prevent it or alleviate its symptoms.
We repeated the procedure with several different neurological disorders, and you can read about what my classmates and I learned from our various blogs on this website. I have to say that I enjoyed this class very much. The way the class was structured lent itself to open discussion and learning about things that you actually want to learn. I think that working together to find an answer on our own actually helped to solidify what we were learning. The best part about it was that I felt like I was learning a lot without loads of busywork or memorization, as many science courses so often are.
We did have to learn some more basic information at the beginning of the course, but that was so we would understand the deeply scientific papers we would have to read later on. I think this type of class also worked very well for the material we were learning. We could learn neurochemistry by learning about various neurological disorders. This gave a very practical application for what we were learning as well. Overall, I think this is a great way to learn, and I think it should be more widely used today.