The marvelous Eszter Hargittai askes an important question: what are the un(?)intended consequences of online courseware?
Personally, I've always avoided using any of the packaged commercial programs for creating my online materials, in part because I think it's just better to use free and open source tools when I can, and in part because I've very suspicious of the intellectual property regimes they enforce or enable. Early versions of the Westlaw courseware software carried assertions that they would own the content; later I think they changed to just claiming a license to it, and I've no idea what it is now. In any case, no thanks. But I've made little headway with the administration, which seems to positively delight in paying for software, on the (usually but not inevitably) mistaken idea that this will provide better support if something breaks.
That said, I don't think any of us here have figured out quite what the right tools are for law teaching, other than a web page with links makes a great syllabus.
