No more than a few lines of code are necessary to restrict large portions of a course-site's chat rooms to duly registered students. A big push at MIT to build a universitywide platform for Web-based instruction will diminish greatly the likelihood of being blown past by competitors elsewhere. It will build expertise in Web teaching techniques among MIT faculty and encourage them to develop new approaches of their own. What it won't do is decisively differentiate the school from its competitors - not for long, anyway. Every other good university in the land is busily learning to exploit the Web to intensify its internal communications.
Good teaching is one of the ways institutions compete for students.
Look a little deeper, however, and you'll find that MIT is caught up in a race for leadership in establishing educational standards of every conceivable sort. For a glimpse of what's at stake, consider the recent history of encyclopedias. Nearly everybody knows the story of how Bill Gates asked to license the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Britannica said no. How Gates went to Warren Buffett to license his World Book Encyclopedia. How Buffett told Gates that people liked to have books on their shelves.