The value of Web pages isn't the issue in the UCLA case.
Academic freedom is.
Professors must be allowed to decide for themselves whether a Web page is consistent with their teaching philosophy and approach to education. What UCLA has done is to take that decision away. The administrators may be sincere in their protestations that they never intended to tell professors how to teach, but I find it disturbing that they still can't see the problem now that the program has been implemented and the actual results are so terribly obvious. If even the chair of the classics department feels pressured to use a Web page in teaching, imagine what it's like for a newly hired assistant professor hoping to get tenure. They charged the students, thus making them accomplices in monitoring whether or not faculty toe the new techno-friendly teaching line.