Coursera and the Unbundling of the University Course
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A university course has historically been inseparable from the university itself — you couldn't take a specific school's course without actually enrolling at that school.
Separating the course from the campus
Coursera's core model partners with universities and instructors to make individual courses available online to anyone, unbundling the course itself from the full degree program, campus, and price tag that used to come attached to it.
What this didn't replace
A certificate from an online course doesn't carry the same weight in most hiring decisions as a full degree, and the hardest parts of education — mentorship, networking, hands-on lab work — don't translate perfectly online. What online platforms are genuinely good at is giving someone access to real, credentialed instruction in a specific skill, on their own schedule, at a fraction of the cost of enrolling in a full program.
It's a pattern worth recognizing anywhere a service has traditionally been bundled: unbundling the part people actually want from everything else attached to it tends to open the market to a lot more people.