The roots are decades old. Britain’s Open University started teaching via radio and television in 1971, the for-profit University of Phoenix has been teaching online since 1989; MIT and others have been posting lectures on the internet for a decade. But the change in 2012 has been electrifying. Two start-ups, both spawned by Stanford University, are recruiting students at an astonishing rate for “massive open online courses” or MOOCs. (source The Economist)