I'm sorry that those who are trying to make an ideological point about the larger issues are, in our case, less concerned about the facts. 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.