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There are some college experiences that don't fit this mold. Many seminars and advanced courses are based on hands-on projects and small-scale discussions with professors. Those are undoubtedly valuable. But core classes tend not to be taught that way. The very classes that should establish a student's base understanding of a subject are taught like assembly lines—lecture, problem set, exam—with no quality control. Sure, the product's quality is graded, but nothing is done about defective understanding as the student is pushed down the line.

Students don't retain anything because they didn't intuitively understand it to begin with.

Why aren't we using the 300-person gathering at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday as an opportunity for active peer-to-peer instruction rather than a passive, one-size-fits-all lecture?

The University System of Maryland now requires undergraduates to take 12 credits in alternative learning modes, including online. Texas has proposed a similar rule. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system is pushing to have 25 percent of credits earned online by 2015. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, pointing to UCF as a model, has made blended learning a cornerstone of its new $20-million education-technology grant program.

"No one enforces you to do the right thing" in an online course, Ms. Hatten says. "It's at your discretion. I care about my grade, so if I don't know the answer, I'm not gonna let myself fail when I have an opportunity to look in the book."

Blended classes generate the highest student evaluations of any learning mode at Central Florida, and, like her classmates, Ms. Black is a fan. She gets as much from the online work as she would from more time in class, she says. Plus, the free time helps make it easier for her to do dance.

Now, there's a pretty good chance that some of the students probably knew that Quinn was a lazy professor, who just used testbank questions, rather than writing his own. That's the kind of information that tends to get around. But it's still not clear that using testbank questions to study is really an ethical lapse. Taking sample tests is a good way to practice for an exam and to learn the subject matter. And while those 200 students "confessed," it seems like they did so mainly to avoid getting kicked out of school -- not because they really feel they did anything wrong -- and I might have to agree with them. We've seen plenty of stories over the years about professors trying to keep up with modern technology -- and I recognize that it's difficult to keep creating new exams for classes. But in this case, it looks like Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?

The answer to that first one surprised me. The "cheating" was that students got their hands on the textbook publisher's "testbank" of questions. Many publishers have a testbank that professors can use as sample test questions. But watching Quinn's video, it became clear that in accusing his students of "cheating" he was really admitting that he wasn't actually writing his own tests, but merely pulling questions from a testbank. That struck me as odd -- and I wasn't really sure that what the students did should count as cheating. Taking "sample tests" is a very good way to learn material, and going through a testbank is a good way to practice "sample" questions. It seemed like the bigger issue wasn't what the students did... but what the professor did.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him.