Traditional classes have advantagesDuring the fall semester of 2000, 1.6 percent of classes at N.C. State were taught through Distance Education. As of this semester, that number has grown to 6.4 percent of the total campus offerings.You may be wondering how this affects you, especially if you’re like me and have only taken a handful of DE classes while you’ve been here. Perhaps I’m just being a worry-wart, but to me, a 20 percent year over year growth in DE classes for the last decade is highly disconcerting.Distance Education by 2020 will be 33 percent.Maybe you’ll agree if you think of it this way. If this growth trendcontinues for another decade, the percentage of classes taught throughWhen I started to think about 33 percent of classes being taught through DE, the only thing that came to my mind was the University of Phoenix Online. That’s right my friends; we are becoming an online University. The farce is that the very institution that claims to be educating us is the source of this increase. Why? You may ask. Quite frankly, the increase comes from the fact that DE classes are cheaper. You won’t find this on any University Web site because it would be badpolicy. Just thinking about it logically will take you to this answer though; the same classes are being taught by the same professors to a larger number of students.NCSU hides this fact by saying DE is an effective delivery method because classes may be taken on a student’s own schedule. It is true DE classes can be more convenient, few people would deny that. But the true origin of their increase, especially at the undergraduate level, is in their economic benefit.Our institution is simply trying to churn us out faster and more cost effectively with little regard to maintaining the quality of our education. In a conversation I had with Jeffery Braden, the dean of CHASS, he quipped that two things survived from the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church and theUniversity system. Braden was using this unenthusiastically, saying that this shows how technological innovation in education has been a long time coming. My take is completely different. Universities survived because they offered a storied and inimitable product. The tradition and heritage is part of why we are here, the unique relationship between a student and teacher is fundamental to the fabric of a university and cannot be replaced by online discussions and e-mail. An institution in which 33 percent of the classes are taught with little to no face-to-face contact is not one I would want to be associated with, nor is it one I would want to send my children to.Braden told me that DE is simply a logical evolution in which teachers help students “manage learning” from the vast sources of information available on the internet. I agree, but that does not mean we should begin to abandon traditional classes.The Internet has opened up vast new resources at the touch of a fingertip, but it would be a real tragedy if this remarkable tool damaged the educational experience.

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