You could make a case that 14 hours of a Ken Burns Civil War documentary is a textbook in a new media format; or at least argue that a high-quality high-fact documentary is valid supplemental teaching material. There's still intellectual renewal, because people will keep making new documentaries just as other people keep writing textbooks.

But it was the word "proctor" that leapt off the page and stuck in my craw. As in "...have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done". Proctor. That's not teaching, that's administrative work. Proctoring is the grad student watching porn on a smartphone while students take a test. Proctoring is administering the "comprehension test" that came with the video to bring "accountability" to the process. Because isn't that the important thing, after all?

In the several years I worked on course delivery systems, I was constantly reminded that the perfessers view video and online courses (and ITV before it) as an attempt by administration to do away with teachers entirely, in favor of recordings of said teachers. They view video cameras with existential dread. It's gotten worse as money's gotten tighter, and the professors aren't being paranoid--too many administrators are tempted by the thought of doing away with those messy academics once and for all, and finally putting education on a "businesslike footing" much like the entertainment industry.

They reason like The Jackass Johnson, that one lecture is pretty much like all the others, so why not just pick the one best lecture and play that for everybody, until the end of time?

It's such a peculiarly conservative thing, to want to have that cognitive closure on everything, to put the issues to rest, to have total conformity of opinion. To put "The Last Lecture on _____" in the can, and finally be done with it. No more intellectual "drift", no more debate and dissent...fossilized thought, uber alles.

I'm cool with the video, extremely not cool with reducing teachers to proctors.