Story told by Edward Prather (Arizona)[1] at MIT[2]. I failed to quickly find an obvious publication.

My recollection is the course was elsewhere, he was invited to lecture (astronomy education improvement is his thing), and said let's instead set it up as a trial, and use this student instead of me.

[1] https://profiles.arizona.edu/person/eprather [2] http://web.mit.edu/physics/events/colloquia.html May 11, 2017, but this link may rot soon.

EDIT: I should amend "inexperienced postdoc" with "who was trained in active learning instruction, and prepared the course with a highly-experienced astronomy education researcher". Because a key issue with active learning is that doing it well, and thus deploying it rapidly, is hard.