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Coursera founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller are computer science professors at Stanford University.

Coursera founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller are computer science professors at Stanford University.

Online education isn't particularly new. It has been around in some form since the 1990s, but what is new is the speed and scale in which online learning is growing.

In barely a year, many of the most prestigious research universities in the world including Stanford, Caltech, Oxford and Princeton have started to jump onto the online bandwagon.

For the students who never, ever would have had access to this kind of quality education from a place like Penn or Princeton or Stanford, they now have access to something.

- Daphne Koller, Coursera co-founder

Those universities now offer classes through consortiums like Coursera, a tech company that's partnered with more than 30 of the top universities in the world to offer online classes from its course catalogue for free. Other companies offering online courses include Udacity and edX.

Earlier this year in Kazahkstan, 22-year-old computer science student Askhat Muzrabayev had a problem.

"The problem is our university is relatively small, it has about 2,000 students, and we didn't have [Artificial Intelligence] classes in the syllabus," Muzrabayev says.

More here:
Online Education Grows Up, And For Now, It's Free