Summary Notes on "Well webucated?" by J. Naughton, The Guardian Weekly, Vol. 164, No. 19, 3-9 May 2001, p. 24 (referred by Colin Brown).

Summarized by J. T. P. Yao (6/15/01)

"… Last month MIT stunned the education world by announcing that it was going to make most of its teaching materials available on the Web free. … Over the next 10 years it will offer assignments, reading lists, outlines and notes on 2,000 courses on its website. The venture is intended to counter what it calls the 'privatization of knowledge.' But no degrees will be granted on the basis of the course work."

"About 500 courses are likely to be made available with two years at a cost of $7.5m-$10m. The ultimate cost is expected to be about $100m."

"At a stroke MIT has blown a gaping hole in the fantasies of governments and venture capitalists about the commercial potential of 'e-learning.' These fantasies were based mainly on the notion that all you needed to get into the online learning business was to post educational 'content' on the Web and collect fees from students. … You have to provide tuition and support and counseling and conferencing and assignments and quality assurance and audit trails and externally certified examinations and other services with involve the employment of real people on real salaries and reduce the return on investments to old-economy dimensions.

"… The fact that MIT teaching material is on the Web does not mean that an MIT-type education is available to anyone who logs in. What is highlights is that there is far more to learning than mere 'content,' that education is not a branch of the infotainment business, and that maybe there is a point in having real universities rather than virtual diploma mills."

[Readers who are interested in this article are encouraged to read the original paper in its entirety. Other summary notes on faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]