It may be the hip topic of the moment, but when I first heard about Moocs (massive open online courses), I thought surely we had seen all this before? More than a decade ago, when companies such as Quisic (known initially as University Access) and UNext signed lucrative deals with many of the world’s top business schools to teach business programmes online.

One dean likened it at the time to the airline industry, where international carriers were fighting to join global partnerships such as Oneworld or Star Alliance. The fear was that business schools would miss out on belonging to one of the top groups and be condemned for ever to be second-rate.

The cream of the business school alliances was undoubtedly UNext, which attracted top US schools such as Chicago, Columbia and Stanford, in addition to the London School of Economics. Quisic went with Kenan-Flagler and London Business School.