It was quite a while ago, so I'm going from memory. At the time, it seemed fairly fresh and lexis was all the rage and it had a halo effect- the 'real Englisah' it was teaching seemed promising. However, despite the efforts of Cobuild, Michael Lewis, etc, corpus based learning hasn't really taken off. There are excellent tools available, like
http://view.byu.edu/, there hasn't been much take-up in teaching, and generally the ideas have met with a lot of apathy, so some continue to plug them. The impact that Cobuild had on lexicography has not been mirrored in the classroom, I'm afraid. In my experience, only a small number of my students have really got into it.
