Students may think the goal of the instructor is to stimulate and entertain them. Faculty think their teaching mission is to inform and enlighten. Why do people by the tens of thousands attend sporting contests despite the high and rising cost of tickets when watching the television would provide more comfort, telescopic vision, and replay. The experience of being part of it, being there is stimulating. We educate by engaging the students in a dueling dance of the minds, whereas monitors sit there receiving only the surface of the mental action.
Education is more than lectures.
We have a forum for a community of learners to test their understandings and their creative ideas. We help students to see into a community of practice so that they learn what we really do, shortcomings and failings included. The range and value of work that we do for students cannot be confined to distance education, we have to bring the students in. The other major big issue of distance education is its threat to professors' claims to their own works. Universities protected books and art but not works of teaching.