When the University of California dangled a $30,000 incentive to thousands of professors in 2010 inviting them to create UC-worthy online courses, just 70 responded, and only a few classes materialized.

Faculty members at California State University were similarly skeptical and warned of "Walmartization" last year as trustees charged each campus $50,000 to help fund "CSU Online."

It turns out that California professors' wariness of online education is shared by faculty across the country, according to a survey released Thursday by Inside Higher Ed, an online publication widely read by academics.

Of 4,564 faculty members surveyed across all types of colleges and universities, 66 percent expressed concern about the quality of online education, saying they believe what students learn is "inferior or somewhat inferior" to what they learn in a classroom. Just 6 percent thought online courses were better.

Another 58 percent felt "more fear than excitement" about cyber-learning.

Yet despite the professors' negative assessments, 60 percent said they had recommended an online course to a student - a reality that lends the new study its name: "Conflicted."

"The challenge is: 'How do we meet the obvious demand for online education but do it in a way that addresses faculty concerns about quality?' " said Jeff Seaman, a researcher with Babson Survey Research Group that conducted the survey for Inside Higher Ed.

Online education is exploding in popularity. About two-thirds of schools nationwide now offer courses, including virtually all community colleges, said Seaman, whose earlier study found that 6.1 million students across the country had taken at least one online course in 2010, up from 1.6 million students in 2002.

Skeptical faculty members say they are not blind to the pervasiveness of online instruction or its inevitable rise. But they caution that courses taken by computer are best suited to certain subjects - lower level math, say - that require the absorption of facts rather than intense interaction among people sharing ideas.

"I'm not against online learning. I'm against the idea that you can substitute what happens in a high-quality liberal arts classroom with an online program," said Wendy Brown, a UC Berkeley political science professor.

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Online education has teachers conflicted