Lectures are a common method of financial knowledge transmission, but they're not so great for financial skills transmission.  

Moreover, the trending behaviors of college students may make lectures an ever-less-effective mode, because they're less engaging than tempting distractions like IM. 

Harvard Business Review's Daily Stat mentions a Study, "Examining the Affects of Student Multitasking With Laptops During the Lecture", which found that their laptops for frequent multitasking during classes, generating, on average, more than 65 new screen windows per lecture, 62% of which were unrelated to the courses they were taking.

Task-based simulations are more engaging, and thereby stickier, and thereby more effective.