From The Chronicle, Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up:

Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

I still believe the major technological paradigm that is going to reshape education is tutoring at scale, and it’s interesting to see that for those that succeed in that realm that’s exactly how the experience feels to them.