A fourth and hybrid perspective on the future of on-line education — Marginal Revolution

Articles like this one sorta irritate me because they pretend that we haven't been here before. Distance education is not a new thing; the technology has merely changed. If you could get an equivalent value out of your education without contact time in meatspace, why didn't correspondence courses take over the market decades ago? I am surprised that bloggers like Tyler Cowen are not more cognizant of this.