A year or two ago, selling education over the Internet was going to be the wave of the future. As yet another university pulls out of the market, it is clear that (outside the kind of low-grade technical training offered by the ‘University’ of Phoenix), this is an illusion. The best hope is for non-commercial ventures like MIT OpenCourseWare.

Now I’m at the University of Queensland, that I’m distantly affiliated with one of these ventures, Universitas 21 Global. It was established a couple of years ago with a lot of fanfare and a claimed budget of $US50 million. So far, an online MBA has been announced – mountains and mice come to mind.