The University of the People may actually be the very first edu MOOC in higher ed. Not certain but it has been developing for 4 years - I remember listening to podcasts of the founder talking at Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Even then, the concept of a massive open course was intriguing
here's an edu startup that contains 14 MOOCs, massive open online courses. It's one of the first that got set up by Stanford University. One popular free course in computer science had 94,000 students when it ran the first time. Not all of them continued or finished but recenty, Colorado University announced that its global online campus would accept transfer credits towards a bachelor's degree if the students could pass a proctored final exam. Welcome to the crowdsourced future of higher education.