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Online education isn't particularly new. It has been around in some form since the 1990s, but what is new is the speed and scale in which online learning is growing.

In barely a year, many of the most prestigious research universities in the world – including Stanford, Caltech, Oxford and Princeton — have started to jump onto the online bandwagon.

President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, are prepping for Wednesday's presidential debate. It's a well-worn tradition now, but it wasn't always that way.

The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon face-off wasn't just the first televised presidential debate, it was also the first presidential debate in more than a century.

Four years earlier, a young German emigre named Fred Kahn, a student at the University of Maryland, wanted to see whether the nominees — Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson — might want to engage with students.

Colorado is a good venue for a presidential debate focusing on domestic issues. The first of three highly anticipated debates between President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, will take place Wednesday at the University of Denver.

The state is known for its independent voting streak, and much like the rest of the country, there are sharp political divides about the role of government in the economy. In Colorado, those differences grow from two distinct population centers.

On-air challenge: Every answer today is a six-letter word or name that has a repeated two-letter pair, like "eraser," which has E-R twice, or "regret," which has R-E twice. The repeated pair of letters can appear anywhere in the word. You'll be given the pair of letters and a clue, and you provide the words.

Colorado is one of a handful of battleground states which could tip this year's election. President Obama won the state in 2008, but polls suggest a tighter contest this election year. Host Rachel Martin talks with Judy Strogoff, editor-publisher of The Colorado Statesman, a weekly nonpartisan political paper based in Denver.

Wednesday, President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney will face each other on the same stage for the first time. It will be one of three opportunities before the election. It could be one of the last opportunities for the candidates to sway voters who haven't yet made up their mind. Host Rachel Martin talks with NPR's Scott Horsley and Ari Shapiro, who have been on the trail with the Romney and Obama campaigns.