Re: Online classes
What program are you in, MM?
I think whichever learning mode you choose depends highly on the subject being taught. I went to a business school where group study/participation was huge. We had 3 hour lectures (per week) for each subject, plus a 1.5 hour seminar for some courses. The lectures were mainly just that… a teacher going over the slides, using the board to explain concepts, and taking some questions here and there (but not a lot given the amount of material required to be covered in that time frame). Seminars, on the other hand, were primarily discussion based and very helpful in keeping everyone engaged and on the same page.
For certain courses, you can easily learn the material on your own, while for others it really helps to have someone readily available to clear any confusion. I feel like if I’m stuck on something, I can waste a lot of time figuring it out.
So one of the things that I actually loved about the classroom experience was learning from your peers and having a study group to motivate each other to stay caught up with the workload. It also helps to know how smart/knowledgeable your competition is, and how much you need to know to get an “A”.
That said, there were definitely courses that didn’t require you to physically sit through a painful lecture because either the material was too easy (like Business Ethics or IT audit) or the professor was not great (Stats 
my dad could have done a better job at teaching me).