Technology-enhanced courses and a mode III organization of instructional work

Although information technology is increasingly used to deliver distance and conventional courses, there have been few studies of the effect of technology-enhanced education on the organization and purposes of academics' instructional work. I explore this issue in undergraduate and masters level education through the vehicle of case analyses of technology-rich classes taught in a public research university in the United States. What the cases illustrate is an emergent pattern of what I am calling 'Mode III' instructional production, in which the production of a course involves a matrix of non-faculty support personnel, and may be oriented to commercial purposes reflective of an increasingly embedded academic capitalism in the new economy.