One challenge is accommodating an increasingly diverse population of students. It is certainly inadequate for a student population with a large number of females and a significant number of minorities from different ethnic groups. Active learning and cooperative learning approaches, coupled with teaming, offer opportunities to appeal to different learning styles. The problems are that faculty are not sensitive to issues of diversity and different learning styles. Furthermore, they have no experience with active learning, cooperative learning and teaming.
Some faculty consider cooperative learning as cheating.
A considerable effort in faculty development must be undertaken to prepare faculty for the diverse classroom of the 21st century. Another challenge is the incorporation of technology into the classroom. Rapid advances in multimedia technology enable the instructor to incorporate video and computer-generated images into the lecture. This offers an opportunity to appeal to visual learners by using computer imagery to display abstract concepts. As a chemist, I would love to take a virtual reality walk around a molecule or use virtual reality to stand in the middle of a chemical process and observe the dynamics of a chemical reaction.