You may be surprised by how hard you'll work–and how well you'll get to know your classmates

Night is falling in Paris, and instead of heading out for dinner, Judy Rowe is in her hotel room, chatting online with her psychology classmates. As an international purser for American Airlines, Rowe, who lives in Davidsonville, Md., spends much of the week traveling. But her often frantic schedule hasn't kept her from pursuing a doctoral degree in psychology at the University of Maryland. She's fortunate, she says, that she doesn't have to "schlep" herself into a classroom each week. "If we didn't have online it would be nearly impossible for me to do my job and go to school at the same time."

  Like Rowe, millions of people have rejected traditional education in favor of E-learning. In many ways, however, the two experiences aren't so different. As she would at a brick-and-mortar university, each semester Rowe peruses a course catalog and registers for classes. She reviews a syllabus. She studies textbooks, writes papers, takes exams, and engages in lively debates with other students, guided by her teachers. So how does her education differ from that of students enrolled in campus-based classes?

For starters, she sits in front of a keyboard for most of this activity, connected to the class via the Internet. Thanks to E-mail and threaded discussions–nonlive, electronic forums in which her classmates interact–Rowe never sets foot in a classroom, nor does she meet her colleagues face to face. But convenience doesn't mean such courses are a piece of cake, say E-students. "Don't think you [will] get off easy," says Steve Rauschkolb, a recent graduate of SetonWorldWide's online master's program in strategic communication and leadership. Rauschkolb, who took one course at a time, estimates he spent 10 hours a week–mostly evenings after dinner–reading, writing assignments, and participating in online discussions.

Equal time. His classmate, Michael Mahony, initially assumed that the course wouldn't be that tough but soon realized, he says, that "oh, my God, this is a lot to do." Mahony learned to slip in an hour of coursework every morning before work. He supplemented this time with additional hours in the evenings and on weekends. In general, says Nancy Stevenson, author of Distance Learning Online for Dummies (Hungry Minds, $19.99), E-students can expect to spend as much time on their courses as they would on equivalent campus-based courses.

By contrast, the pacing of E-courses may be quite different. By the end of college, most students are all too familiar with the standard system for evaluating students each semester–a midterm, a final, and a couple of papers. Instead, online courses often require students to write papers each week and contribute regularly to class discussions. In Gina DeRossi's online poetry class at Syracuse University, for example, students were graded on the quality of their critiques of the...