The online university market is currently dominated by networks set up by leading universities in the United States.
This year has seen intense interest among universities in the United States over the growth of online university platforms.
Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said online university networks could "offer a high quality learning experience to anyone who wants it".
There have also been developments in the UK's fledgling online university platform, Futurelearn, announced by the Open University last year.
For instance, in 1993, Jones International University became the first fully online university accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.
FORBES: Distance Learning Has Been Around Since 1892, You Big MOOC
So often one hears people snicker when an online university is mentioned.
FORBES: Technology's Continuing Struggle to Disrupt Higher Ed
The rival edX online university project on the US east coast has been funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and is not for profit.
Other universities, such as Stanford University, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University, are affiliated with UNext, a privately held company that has just started a degree-granting online university focused on business training.
Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so.
The Great Gatsby author kept records of his publications, income and key events in a ledger, which has been put online by the University of South Carolina.
That Orange County mortgage broker (who used to be a pizza delivery guy) can take a class online from the University of Phoenix (APOL) and become a computer engineer in Silicon Valley.
FORBES: How Do You Fix the Hollowing Out of America's Middle Class?
It actually operates within stores, powering in-shop rental kiosks for 80 colleges including NYU, UNC Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University, running online rentals for 100 schools, among them University of Oregon and Oregan State University.
FORBES: The Netflix of Textbooks: Renting Tomes To Rake In Cash
He also received an MBA online at Arizona State University during that time.
He is working through a computer systems program at local community college and says that his online classes at P2P University compare well to his in-person courses.
But with a well established competition and a plethora of fresh-faced game developers leaving university or online programs producing free-to-play games, the move has been met with suspicion.
Liberty's Web courses face strong competition from the Christian online school Grand Canyon University (10, 000 students), acquired a couple of years ago by Significant Education, a Phoenix, Ariz. private equity group.
Liberty's Web courses face strong competition from the Christian online school Grand Canyon University (10, 000 students), acquired a couple of years ago by Significant Education, a Phoenix, Arizona private equity group.
It's not the first university to go online--if anything, MIT is a step behind.
More than 300, 000 people around the world have signed up for online courses run by Edinburgh University.
BBC: Rush to log on to online courses at Edinburgh University
The company has even created its own Bright Horizons University that provides online professional development courses and child care certification.
It was a downward extension of the university's online education program.
Mr Willetts, speaking at the Guardian Higher Education Summit, told university leaders that online universities were going to be an important part of the global expansion in student numbers.
Her co-founder and fellow Stanford professor Andrew Ng said the online courses would open up university to many more students and "credit-bearing college courses is a huge milestone toward that goal".
About 13, 000 students from around the world will start taking an online statistics course at Wesleyan University in Connecticut next week using SAS On-Demand and the R language.
FORBES: Wesleyan Takes A Passion For Statistics To The MOOC World With SAS
Those with smartphones are also more likely to be sexually active in general, and more likely to say they had been approached for sex online, researchers from the University of Southern California said.
Even the three institutions whose instructors teach those online courses Duke University, University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Irvine so far don't plan to award credit to students who complete the massive open online courses, known as MOOCs.
Many exist solely in cyberspace, like Concord University, the first online law school, created in 1998.
Give A Grad A Go strives to fill the void between university career services, online job boards and recruitment agencies.
"This does not always happen, " Dr Marian Walker, a senior lecturer in stroke rehabilitation at Nottingham University told BBC News Online.
应用推荐