Online education has been around for a while and perceptions of the quality of online education have lagged behind that of the traditional classroom. But that's suddenly changing with a growing number of examples where online is actually outperforming the classroom.
L. Liu, F. Maurer, and H. Erdogmus. ADC '05: Proceedings of the Agile Development Conference, page 80--89. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2005)