I do know that I enjoyed hanging around in the CmptSci common room and I learned a lot just shooting the breeze with students, TAs and the occasional prof. I would never have learned as much in a chatroom nor would I want to hang around in a chatroom. There are so many modes of communication that are not possible with the chatroom and you don't have the opportunity to bump into random, interesting people.

Computers allow much better tests and quizzes, for one thing.

1. One argument is that we already have franchised them: universities have access to textbooks of a higher-quality than they previously had. I'm sure we have more universities per capita than before the printing press... (though I haven't the stats).

2. You can set up a course today based on MIT resources. You have a professor (of lower quality), you have classmates (of lower quality). But the point about these things is that they still are greatly beneficial for learning, even if they aren't the greatest in the world.

3. McUniversity. The aforementioned trademark ("insignia of origin") aspect of a top uni: "Oh, you went to MIT?" etc. Franchising it dilutes it into a McUniversity (appropriately).

4. Facetime doesn't scale. Sure you can distribute face-time of a high-quality professor geographically with web-video etc, but such professors don't have enough time for all their students already.

But... an interesting concept... and surely there are aspects that do scale well, and can be franchised better than before due to today's tech... and therein lies a startup.

It looks to me like they try to cram as much stuff-that-looks-like-content in as possible so they can justify charging $100+ for the book. The disease is particularly bad at the first-year level where the publishers need to compete against dozens of other damn-near-identical textbooks; this is why every first-year physics textbook I know weighs half a ton and has lots of pretty pictures, whereas the actual content could probably be whittled down to a hundred pages or so.

Instead of becoming a new medium, the computer, for the most part, is used as a facilitator of conventional ways of teaching - it's a better typewriter, a better book, a better way to watch a lecture.