It is difficult to predict how the online world will affect teaching beyond providing articles, working papers, and data sets. Currently some publishers are supplementing principles texts with online sites that have both instructor aids and material for students, including biweekly current event exercises, news notification services, mailing lists, PowerPoint slides online, and lists of web sites. There are e-mail discussion lists for teaching8 and many local lists for interaction between students and instructors. One of us requires that the book and the lectures be evaluated each week via e-mail. Many economists now post syllabi, previous tests, exercises, and exam results on web sites.
There are beginnings of online textbooks such as Daniel (an intermediate micro book) and McCain (a principles book). Whether these will replace, or just supplement current hard copy textbooks is uncertain. Classroom Expernomics is an online and hard copy journal with articles concerning the use of experiments in teaching economics. For example, the latest issue contains an experiment which demonstrates the effects on real aggregate output of anticipated versus unanticipated monetary policy. The National Budget Simulation is a simple but well done simulation to show trade offs in balancing the budget. The Iowa Electronic Markets, used in more than 70 classes in 30 universities, has actual money futures contracts which depend on economic and political events--participating in the market provides students with real incentives (a $5 to $500 investment is required to participate in the markets) to learn about markets and follow economic, financial and political news. The Election Calculator allows one to enter information about the state of the economy to forecast the winner of presidential elections, and the FAIRMODEL, developed by Ray C. Fair, can be used to forecast the economy, adjusting various policy or even structural components. Of course most government agencies have web pages so that, for example, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury can be directly consulted in teaching about money. Thus, networks mean that resources invested in developing material for class can be made available for others at little cost. Hence, we can imagine selecting from multiple sources to compile a personalized online textbook, and certainly a personalized online collection of online articles, similar to what is done now in hard copy.
Further in the future, videos of lectures for students who miss class, or videos of lectures from the best people in the field can be distributed. Even Nobel lectures can be made available, as well as sessions from meetings. The technology for all of this now exits, only implementation and use remain.