Currently, junior faculty are evaluated for promotion to tenure based on two ingredients: research and teaching. However, these two ingredients are not equally weighted. The vast majority of the tenure case is determined by research accomplishments, particularly in science and engineering.

This is in part because of the inherent inequality between research and teaching. Research programs can have an international reputation, reaching people across the globe and in an asynchronous way. Traditional teaching, by comparison, is geographically localized, reaches a limited audience and must be experienced synchronously. It is hard for a teacher (even an excellent teacher) to make the case that their pedagogical accomplishments are as meritorious as their research program.

Online education tools could potentially level this playing field, allowing teaching to reach a global audience and giving it a shelf-life of years rather than hours. In this situation, teaching could rejoin research as an equal partner in what determines an excellent faculty member at a place like MIT.