Reliance upon teaching methods inappropriate for the web set distance learning up for failure.
Dreyfus has a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes online learning. According to his model, one does not have to be trained to teach online because the best that one could hope for in online learning is a reproduction on the internet of the offline lecture model.
The model of distance learning that he criticizes in "On The Internet" is hopelessly out of date, the correspondence course model of anonymous information consumers, "...just sitting alone in front of one's computer screen looking at a lecture downloaded for the Web." (p.91) He is obviously not familiar with modern learning management systems.
Instructors who feel this way will not support online learning or be very effective teachers online if they think that "Disembodied learning, in my view, will be a poor substitute for classroom teaching." (Beckett 1998). Online learning should not be a substitute but should be recognized as the totally new medium that it is.
For Merleau-Ponty there can be no experience outside the body. Any warning about the dangers of disembodied experiences are pointless because such a thing is not possible. For both philosophers, there can be no split between the mind and the body. It is a mystery to me why Dreyfus would claim it was a "danger."
We live in a culture that is very alienated from the body. It does not seem unusual to me that this alienation is projected onto technology in the Jungian sense.