throw-a-video-lecture-on-YouTube? These classes are interactive. Most of them involve are weekly quizes, midterm and final exams and automatically graded programming assignments. There are deadlines for all of these, and if your performance is good enough, you get a certificate with a grade. And they're all free and massive (coursera has millions of students).

I haven't heard about the online Illinois courses before, sorry. Were they free? Were they truly massive? Were they offered to anyone, even to highschool students or unemployed bartenders in Uganda?

And even if these courses aren't truly innovating, the point is they're making MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) popular and available to millions of people.

I'm a highschool student from Greece. In the last year, I've learned AI, ML, NLP (although my performance wasn't good enough to get a certificate from this class), SaaS and Algorithms through MOOCs. All these from some of the world's best professors. I even was a community TA in the second offering of the SaaS class because of my performance in the first offering. Coursera (I've only taken one udacity class, and edX is new) is changing my life.

Please answer honestly: Could I do these things 2 years ago?

In this sense, education is changing.