Max, I agree with your assessment. Delivery online offers possibilities as well as drawbacks, but certainly the debate shouldn’t be about whether it is effective or not. The NY Times reported on a study back in October where online learning was shown to be more effective than traditional classroom learning. Certainly textbooks and large parts of education are going to go through substantive transformations due on online content, delivery, access, etc., just as happened with the music industry. And our students are online. That’s the main justification for me – I can also reach them online, and not just through the traditional classroom.

But for the second part, I completely agree. Universities know this future is coming, and they are looking to establish their place in this new domain and will surely exploit professors, students, staff and others to their advantage (patricularly when people aren’t paying attention). I agree, professsors need to be reimbursed for their work in developing a course. Perhaps a new model will come to be, where there is more division of labor – experts are developing web content, others at online interactions, others in traditional classrooms.

I am quite ambivalent in some ways about the “free” mantra of the internet. The expectation is almost as if we have to give our work away for free at this point. It’s not a very humane model, as free doesn’t support my family. So we have to think carefully about what is actually happening and how we develop a “free” model that matches our ideals for education and for anthropology online. One piece that has really questioned me this way is Jason Baird Jackson’s Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps, which speaks to the work we give away for free to multinational companies through the mantra of peer review. We definitely have to avoid the same dynamic online!