The best increase in accessibility to education in decades was online education. Online courses have been fairly traditional college courses offered for credit directly by universities which eliminated distance barriers to college enrollment.

 

Massive Open Online Courses or MOOC's take online education to a new level offering the opportunity to learn to a much wider office accross institutions.

MOOC's operate off of platforms like Coursera, edX and Udacity. Each platform makes it possible for multiple universities such as the Penn State University and the University of Tokyo to offer classes to a wider audience. In addition to universities, other institutions that offer training have begun to offer training through MOOC's.

 

Coursera's website, www.coursera.com, boasts a student community of 27 million who are enrolled in classes taught in 5 languages at 33 universities accross four continents. 

 

In the beginning, MOOC's were non-credit. Now the American Council on Education or ACE is evaluating MOOC's for college credit. What this means to high school students is that as MOOC's are evaluated, a much larger number of freshmen will save room, board and travel costs and get a top notch education at home. Further, MOOC's will change limitations in college admissions imposed by the number of seats in classrooms or the number of rooms in dormitories. Duke Provost Peter Lange is quoted on the Coursera website as seeing MOOC's extend Duke's educational reach to students who would not otherwise have had access to their faculty.