He knows how to dramatize his subject matter. What critics of online education are mainly concerned about is the final product . They say courses contrived for presentation on a computer monitor can never be as enlightening as material taught in a lecture hall. You get bland, unimaginative classes that take no risks and convey little, if any, of the professor's personality and spirit. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a faculty fellow at New York University and author of a forthcoming book on the history of copyright, worries that the mass-marketing of higher education will taint academia as a whole.
Courses are services and learning environments.
They are not products that can be owned. When universities become content providers, they cease being universities. They are merely high-priced publishers. And, like all publishers, universities are worried about competition from the Internet. NYU set up its own online operation based on the publishing model.