Typically, education has three components:

1. student does independent study based on assigned reading
2. student attends a lecture, maybe asks a few questions
3. student takes an exam

It seems to me that step 2 is fairly useless: that time spent in class (and going to and from class) could be better spent in additional independent study. Anything a professor can say in class can be found, better expressed, in a book (or video lecture), to which the professor should be able to direct the student. Questions could be handled better by email/forum/etc, allowing the student more time to formulate intelligent questions, and the professor more time to formulate intelligent answers. Apart from improving education, these changes would make it much less expensive (far lower teacher to student ratio would be required).

Do you agree that in-class time is greatly overvalued?