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about 75 percent of online students were already on the campus or lived nearby

hybrid university

Blended classes generate the highest student evaluations of any learning mode at Central Florida

Mr. Harrison, the accounting major, takes a business class with more than 1,000 students. The lectures are given live, he says, in a room that fits 68.

There's a lot of distractions that come with putting courses on the Internet.

e-mail students, call them, tweet them, Facebook them, chat with them

Beyond course announcements, Ms. Hatten's interactions with the professor have been limited to one e-mail exchange.

If you want to encounter distance education, a student once said, sit in the back of a 500-seat lecture.

Teaching and learning are inextricably linked in a shared process.

close UCF, for surely it is not serious about university level education

streaming recorded content, which is not online learning

a good education is not a product but an experience

the current culture views us as providing a product not an experience

Online education will eventually denigrate into the 500-seat classroom, minus the classroom.

he convenience of online classes can be a slacker's paradise. Schedule the right mix, and you might not have to face a live professor before 1:30 in the afternoon. Which means you can stay out until 4 in the morning and still sleep nearly eight hours. Not only that: Some students talk about online classes being so easy a caveman could pass them. In a test, there's no one telling you that you can't look at the book, says Ariel Hatten, 20, a junior and nursing major who considers her online class an easy A.

"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."

. For her finance class, there's a quiz on Chapter 4. Basic stuff—10 questions, open book. And there's also a discussion question to answer: "What is working capital, and where is it listed on the balance sheet?" "That's more or less your participation for the class," she says.

Mr. Choi, who teaches tourism management, worries some students may view the reduced class schedule as time off.

I still have a phobia and a concern," he says. "Maybe I should still talk about a few basic things to some of the students who probably enjoyed the football yesterday and didn't do anything for the class."

Mr. Harrison catches some lectures and skips others. He likes the freedom of these video classes. Learning online can also be a challenge. "You can walk through the library, and literally, you'll see students who are watching a lecture but also have Facebook open right behind it," he says. "And, it's sort of like, 'How much time are you spending on each frame? Are you actively taking notes, or are you just chatting with your friends?'

Once the shaggy-haired fraternity rusher learned to manipulate the system, though, he ended up handling so much of his course work online that his actual butt-at-a-desk class time has shrunk to about six hours a week.