Twenty years ago this month, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at Cern, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, proposed a system that would manage information about its experiments and enable people to work together through a web of hypertext documents.

Sir Tim called his idea “Mesh” – he coined the term “World Wide Web” a year later. Business schools were not alone in taking a while to exploit the technology, but, 20 years on, the web has become an integral part of the programmes they offer. There is more to come, too – emerging web technologies will further enrich online education.

That world would not exist without the internet, but distance learning has a longer history, and might have continued almost unchanged had the online revolution not taken place.