Stanford's classes are specially designed for online education (i.e. not a byproduct of on-campus lectures from 2003). In last years 3 major innovation dramatically increased effectiveness of online education:

1. Special format (found by Salman Khan): short videos, blackboard

2. A lot of quizzes inside lectures (inquiry based learning). See http://t.co/eN9g9MAU and http://t.co/YiXUMs9x

3. Group effects (http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_educa...). If your class has definite schedule and you have thousands of people doing this class with you and communicating while doing it, your results will be much higher.