As the head of Open Learning at MIT, Sanjay Sarma has a daunting job description: to fling open the doors of the MIT experience for the benefit of the wider world. But if you're going to undertake such an ambitious project, you first have to ask: How exactly does learning work? What conditions are most conducive? Are our traditional classroom methods - lecture, homework, test, repeat - actually effective? The science transforming how we learn.