Deferring again talking about implications of online content...
There are two different ways to play a Networking course. Is the room full of potential Network engineers, or is it full of potential application developers? It makes a difference.
In the case of UAlbany, the course is offered in the framework of the Computer Science department, and the students tend to be mostly software oriented. This means that I should be trying to make them comfortable with socket programming paradigms, which are a bit different from straight line single threaded development exercises. Socket programming is also what many (most?) of the full time faculty think the course is supposed to be about.
But this doesn't excuse me from teaching a lot of the lower level stuff. I've encountered a few too many software developers, who while competent on the development side, are more than a little vague on how some of the networking stuff actually operates. You can write a socket program without understanding how the client side determines a port number, but you may find yourself at a loss when trying to use tools like nmap, tcpdump and wireshark to poke at your application with a stick, and may be pretty clueless about firewall setup as well. So at the bare minimum we need to talk about IP and friends, and it makes little sense to leave out layers 1 & 2 (ISO model) when talking about everything above them.
So the future evolution of the course will need to improve on the socket programming side while still providing the students with a solid foundation in how the various layers in the reference model work.
And there will always be a need to cover things like clocks and NTP because I can't see them encountering that stuff anywhere else before they graduate and move out into the real world.