"You can do it at your own convenience," he said of the class. Except for meetings on group projects and seeing the professor a few times, the rest of the class is all taken on computers at the school or in his home. Dickinson said online courses are a good alternative if the traditional classrooms are full.

Moving to Web-based instruction is also an added expense for schools, which will always have a need for the traditional classroom setting inside brick-and-mortar buildings, according to Fullmer. But there's a flip side.

"I think there are ways where technology can support higher education in the kind of growth challenges it has," said Michael Petersen, executive director of the Utah Education Network.

Increased enrollment has been met with little or no state funding in recent years, which adds to the backlog of building needs on campuses. Petersen said that the Web can help a crowded college accommodate more students if they don't have to use a classroom for instruction.

UEN is a state-funded entity charged with helping all public schools and all of higher education get connected to the Internet and to each other via interactive video conferences. Lawmakers like what UEN is doing.

Over the past two years the Utah Legislature has funded UEN with $800,000 just to increase network capacity for all of public education and at the state's 10 public colleges and universities. That money was met with matching federal grants and negotiated lower costs from telecommunications providers, which translates into about $3 million to help improve Internet capabilities at schools.

The 2004 Legislature gave UEN another $600,000 to beef up video conferencing capabilities through high-speed Internet connections and to develop more Web resources, such as an online library now serving students.

"I would say Utah is one of the leading states in terms of network capabilities and connectivity," Petersen said.

By the end of next summer, 60 percent of all state-funded secondary schools will have high-speed ethernet connections while all of public higher education is already dialed into this latest Internet technology.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com