If you have a job, or a family, that's your life. You can't hang out at a university all day. Many returning adult students are less interested in degrees than in updating their repertoire of business skills and technical know-how, all to stave off career obsolescence in a time of downsizing, outsourcing and globalization. Adult learning is making education continuous instead of episodic. You can't fill up your tank at age 25 and then coast without needing to refill.
Every location is wired so that professors can see and hear any student.
Each student's desk is outfitted with a computer for taking notes, surfing the Web, viewing lecture slides or e-mailing questions to classmates or teaching assistants. Then, the lag in response time jerks the class back to the realities of distance. Students also sense that professors proceed too briskly through their lectures when addressing a camera lens instead of a crowd. Here, the professor just pushes on, because he has to, and there's no way to tack on an extra five minutes to talk. But computer-driven education does have advantages over traditional modes of teaching.