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One huge advantage of the online experience is the freedom from time and space restrictions--somtimes beneficial for the residential experience, but sometimes limiting, too (for example, I have heard professors complain that they used to teach X material in 15 weeks, now they have to teach the same material in 12 weeks). So we should take advantage of the strengths of both. Platforms should allow students in the residential experience to collaborate and communicate with their peers outside of class hours to achieve classroom goals, while still being guided by TAs and professors. Two examples:
Design classes. Design classes limit brainstorming and ideation phases to in-class experiences. While the immediacy and creativity of in-person exercises should not be discounted, how many times have we each had a great idea while walking, taking a shower, or eating dinner? Right now those ideas are not captured and do not contribute to group projects--that phase ended when lecture ended. An online tool could extend these sessions by allowing students to do quick sketch-ups and share them with a class or team, which could then vote on the best ideas. For certain classes, this could extend the idea-sharing phase by about a week.
Goal-oriented assessment. Others have mentioned improving assessment from simple tests to more complex tasks. I would lump that into this discussion and provide some examples of my perspective. Currently, homework and exams are very "checklist" oriented--you got the right answer for problem 1? Check! But with the power of online tools and automated graders, professors should be encouraged to create goal-oriented problems. Like the Netflix Prize or TopCoder. Where correct answers might be graded by passing a certain threshold of performance (i.e. 5% improvement over X algorithm), but the highest grades / recognition are given to those who top the class. An online platform enables this through things like a public leaderboard and automated graders. Additional goals could be set to encourage collaboration with others to combine strategies for optimal results. Obviously this may only apply to a subset of classes (and may already be done, depending on the class?).
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Unique vs commodity education
What every education institution needs to assess is, what components of the education process are being commoditized by new technology and media. It seems reasonably clear that academic content, what's in textbooks and what gets written on black/whiteboards, is now a commodity, available from many sources and of high quality. What makes an MIT education unique is how the institution facilitates creating and metabolizing that content, i.e., turning facts and techniques into knowledge and insight. MIT needs to ascertain what it does that nobody else can do, and rebuild the institution around this source of value. Personally, I think that is mostly a task of meticulously maintaining a brand that attracts the best minds and gives them an attractive and stimulating place to synthesize new content and metabolize existing content together. MIT gave me a great education, but if I am honest, I could have gotten much of that education at any number of institutions. But what I couldn't get is the brilliant minds of my classmates and class leaders that MIT surrounded me with and that challenged me to understand why and how the commodity facts and techniques were important, and to make use of them to create new value. What makes the MIT brand draw this distinctive group of minds together? That is what The Institute must rigorously understand and vigorously protect and enhance.