That's pretty awesome -- it's like breakout sessions after a normal lecture, but with grad students replaced by the professor.

The "inverted-online-lecture-followed-by-guided-work-in-class" is the method that Salman Khan of Khan Academy fame pioneered. This was the first time technology was truly leveraged to make a leap in instruction efficiency. Salman Khan has several talks on this topic.

Sal Khan, who started Khan Academy in 2006, was a relative latecomer: "Flipping the classroom" was pioneered in part in the 1990s by Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur — and Dr. Mazur has said that it's a variation of law-school Socratic method that's been around (with pre-class reading instead of video) since the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

The issue is, if you miss a point at the beginning of the lecture, you can't ask a question, you'll have to wait for the live session to do so. This impacts the topic and remainder of the video

Nothing's perfect, but an email to the prof should alleviate some of that problem.

> you can't ask a question, you'll have to wait for the live session to do so.

Or check on one of the gazillion resources you have in 2024.

The whole idea is that instead of having the teacher spend their time teaching the basics (which they can record once and let you watch together with all the resources you have), they spend time exclusively talking with the students.

In the end, the students have a lot more time to ask questions to the teacher, and they don't have to feel stupid asking them because they have actually studied before.