To lecture or not to lecture, that is the question, etc.
I was a little taken aback by some of the teaching "innovations" in this NPR presentation, as many of them were already in place when I was an undergraduate in the late 80s and early 90s. As the comments at Historiann's suggest, it may well be that the humanities and STEM fields are simply out of alignment; I consider myself a reasonably competent and relatively conservative instructor, and yet my lecture courses regularly include small-group work, a fair amount of interactivity, and brief writing exercises that require all students to contribute (e.g., asking the students to develop questions--something, I noted with amusement, the NPR report identifies as a pedagogical novelty). Oh, and I expect students to do the reading before class, which, I gather, the students in this report found onerous. Hmm.
Two things gave me some qualms:
1) The skills vs. knowledge model. Yes, skills are important, and yes, being able to use/analyze/apply material is frequently better than merely memorizing it, but...in the humanities, at least, you usually need to have mastered content in order to know that now you need to go look up something else. And, often enough, the amount of content necessary is fairly substantial--or, at least, requires a substantial investment of time. "Skills" will not help beyond a certain point if you're trying to engage with a deeply allusive literary work (and surely it's actually more efficient to groan "Oh, no, not another allusion to Satan in Paradise Lost" because you know Paradise Lost than it is to type chunks of text into Google).
2) So, after all this talk of innovative instruction! And how valuable instruction is! And how awesome it is that we're finally talking about alternatives to lecturing! It turns out that at one of the institutions NPR is celebrating, the University of Minnesota--Rochester, the teaching-centric faculty ("student-based") are...wait for it..."not expected to do any research, and they aren't eligible for tenure." In other words, the traditional teaching vs. research hierarchy seems to be well in play, with those focused on teaching hived off into adjunct status.