I call it the Revolution of 2012.
During that year Harvard and MIT announced their EdX consortium, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera and Stanford created the the Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning.
I teach at Stanford and study the political economy of higher education. And, for once in my life, I felt, I was at the right place, at the right time. At the time, I was co-editing a collection of essays, Remaking College, which involved learning about higher education’s digital history.
While conveying instruction online is as old as the web, the revolution of 2012 transformed what had long been considered a suspect industry tainted by scandal into something through which some of the world’s most prominent universities, scientists and venture capital firms were seeing tomorrow.
