ABSTRACT
While online education delivered via the internet has been around for about two decades, many people still don’t know exactly what it is, or how it’s done, or even what some of the terms used to describe it mean. The MOOC craze of recent years heightened the awareness of many to the possibilities of online learning, but muddied the waters when popular commentators, in debating the merits or perils of online learning, often failed to distinguish between the pre-existing model of small-scale online courses led by instructors and these new opportunities in which thousands or even tens of thousands of would-be learners might be involved.
