If you’re headed to college in the fall, odds are good that you’ll end up taking at least one class online. Back in 2008 — ages ago, in internet time — nearly a third of all students were enrolled in at least one course taught online.

Call me old-fashioned, but I find it hard to believe that online classes can measure up to the dynamic give-and-take of the traditional face-to-face class. But it turns out that a number of recent studies have proved me wrong. In fact, when the Department of Education looked at the hundreds of studies that have been done on online learning over the past decade and a half, they found that students in online classes actually did marginally better than those in “normal” ones.

And, of course, the number of online classes is only growing. Quite a few Baltimore-area schools offer online-only courses, and sometimes even online-only degrees.  Goucher offers a distance-learning Master’s in digital arts; Hopkins has an online Master’s in museum studies, just to name a few.

So what’s your take on online learning? Just as good as the old-fashioned way? Better? Does anything get lost in translation?