I remember being bitten by the MOOC bug years ago at Penn State, not because I was enamored by the delivery model, but because I was curious about teaching and learning at scale and the idea that we should be taking risks with how we deliver it. The MOOC bubble did come and go, but while few people have been looking, Coursera, Udacity, and edX have moved forward with all sorts of interesting things.

I would say the announcement of a fully online Computer Science degree from an Ivy League school is an interesting development. From, Inside Higher Ed …

The new master’s degree in computer and information technology from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science will be the engineering school’s first fully online degree. The program is aimed at working adults who are unable or unwilling to enroll in Penn’s established, on-campus version of the master’s, and who want to work in software development or high-demand fields like bioinformatics, medicine, finance and telecommunications. “This is a meaningful expansion of what we can do,” said Wendell Pritchett, the university’s provost. He said the new online degree is designed to appeal to nontraditional students “who are talented but can’t get to us on campus.”

I applaude UPenn for making this bold move and while it doesn’t justify the original hype in the MOOC crazed world of a few years ago, it does justify the notion that it is important to place a few bets here and there to see what can happen if you ignore the naysayers and just do something. In this case, what Coursera and UPenn have done is open up an Ivy League degree to so many more people — people who probably couldn’t otherwise step onto the campus in Philly because of time, location, cost, or other factors.

“This degree represents the democratization of computer science,” Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera’s CEO, said in a written statement. “It brings a world-class, Ivy League degree within reach of people of all backgrounds, from anywhere in the world.”

This makes me happy. I like the Internet. A lot.