Although this teaching lacked the heroic content Sullivan felt architecture required, he did draw from it his famous dictum about form and function.

ECONOMIST: Poet in stone and steel

CORE's objective is to introduce advanced courseware from MIT and other top-ranked universities from around the world, by using the latest information technology, teaching methodologies, instructional content and other resources to enhance the quality of higher education within China.

UNESCO: Open Educational Resources

First, the teaching activity must be focused not only on the content, but more on the student learning processes.

FORBES: Unishared: Revolution in Online Education Beyond Coursera, Edx, and Udacity

Teaching guides were produced by the teachers and contained individualised content according to the particular context and situation of each group of students and their environment.

UNESCO: Integral School Literacy Programme

The Teaching Company's other advantage: fired-up content providers.

FORBES: Magazine Article

These teachers volunteered to have their classes videotaped and their lessons scored by experts, to have their students evaluate their teaching, to fill out surveys about the support they receive and to be assessed on their content knowledge.

WSJ: Bill and Melinda Gates on Teacher Evaluation

The goal, says David Cerullo, chief executive of the nonprofit enterprise, is to entertain Jesus lovers and convert nonbelievers through TV content, including gardening and talk shows, that is more contemporary than the "teaching and preaching" served up by most religious broadcasters.

FORBES: Divine Ambition

"We do it by teaching computers to read everything that is reported or shared on the internet, and automatically produce interesting social content about it, " it says on its site.

BBC: Google acquires news stream service Wavii

This paradigm, which combines meaningful work that can be graded at scale with peer-teaching among students, allows us to offer some of our best educational content to students around the world, at a negligible marginal cost of pennies per student.

CNN: Top college courses, for free?