It's hard to sit through a bad lecture. Your eyes droop, slowly fall shut and then jerk open. You wish you could be anywhere else but there. The rambling professor eats an hour of your day with that bad lecture, maybe more. As you leave the classroom, thanking the stars above that you don't have to go back until the weekend has passed, you see a solution to your bad-lecture problems tacked innocently on a bulletin board: Your boring lecture course is being offered... online!The number of online courses offered by colleges has risen steadily since 1999, when, according to the Washington Post, a small company called Blackboard-run by a handful of 20-somethings-produced software that would help colleges put courses onto the Internet. It was a breakthrough; with this technology, universities could expand their student bodies exponentially but avoid the strain that would be placed on their personnel and facilities if these students were to physically attend the college. It also wouldn't affect admissions percentages and the amount of financial aid given out by the school, meaning the budget could (theoretically) remain intact.

That was January 1999. Now, seven years later, the Sloan Consortium (a research group associated with New York University's Sloan School of Business) estimates that about 3 million students take online courses, a number that has been rising roughly 25 percent each year, according to an April 2005 article in The Washington Post. And according to an Associated Press article published just this month, the fastest growing group of students taking online courses is made up of those already enrolled in, living at and physically attending their college.

Brandeis has never offered extensive online courses, though the Justice reported in September 2004 that some professors had attempted online summer school courses, with mixed results. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of colleges that offer online classes: large universities and those that exist exclusively online.

The latter are not my primary concern, because an exclusively online degree often serves adults who are updating skills or continuing their education while also holding a job.

The multitude of online courses being offered by normal colleges is something that I do find disturbing, however. There is a practical reason for these courses to exist-large state schools often have groups of "distance students" who live too far away to commute to campus. Online courses are geared toward these students; they can attend their classes when they need to, and can otherwise do their work via the Internet. And at these large colleges, online courses might actually make students feel as if they are getting more personal attention from their professors.

But when resident students begin to take online courses because it permits them more time to "do things they like," (in the case of the AP article, the student wanted more time to restore motorcycles), then I think that we're seeing a serious erosion of the meaning and purpose of higher education.

I got the "memorize and regurgitate" method of learning out of my system in high school. College is the time to work on making your thinking more sophisticated, which cannot happen through a class that promotes rote memorization. To grow in the ways intended by higher education requires social interaction: You must learn not just from books and notes, but from people.

Brandeis offers a pretty good deal: for $32,500 tuition a year, I get small classes that are taught by unbelievably smart professors and populated by very smart students. I have sometimes learned more from the students than my professors; they ask questions I want answered but never thought to ask, they push my thinking in directions that would have been unfathomable even days before and they force me to realize that even though I thought everyone at the table was a snobby, careless person, I was completely wrong. The personal interaction offered by Brandeis in a class environment is priceless; no online course, no matter how easy or convenient, could ever provide me with such a rich education-an education that permeates not just my academic mind, but my human soul as well.

This is not to say that online classes should be abolished, or that they don't have a place in higher education. I am able to support myself, thanks to my parents, on only a part-time job; those in other financial situations may find online college to be the perfect solution. But if you are going to physically and financially commit yourself to higher education, especially a liberal arts education, then shouldn't you take advantage of the full scop of the college experience?

That means not through a computer screen, but in a classroom, on or near a campus, with people about your age, everyone following the same broad path to their respective futures. To give that experience up for a few more hours of free time is a horrific waste of time, money and opportunity. In a world increasingly dominated by technology, full of people who now only communicate through Bluetooth headset or Blackberry e-mail, by text message or IM, college is one of the last times in our lives when constant social interaction is enthusiastically supported. If we're going to shirk that privilege in favor of online convenience, then we may as well not go to college at all.