Can I just say this is super exciting. In Australia, where I live, there was a very brief period where university education was free. It was before my time, but I remember the feeling I had as a child when I first heard about it - not amazement or disbelief, something closer to "oh yeah, that makes sense". I figured that education would have to be free because otherwise poor people would stay poor forever. Not the most airtight reasoning, but I think my heart was in the right place. I hadn't really considered the resources that would need to go into it, and who would inevitably have to foot the bill.

But this is the best kind of regression. Maybe the childish dream of "hey, let's just teach everyone" isn't so ridiculous now that we have the right technology. I find it easy to get frustrated sometimes thinking of how much power we have at our disposal, and how much of it goes into more efficient cat sharing and other electronic distractions (some of which, in fairness, I like quite a bit). This is a pretty cool example of how much what we do can mean to people: not just entertaining them but radically improving their lives.

The best part, though, is that this isn't even news. This has all already happened. Between the Khan Academy, OCW, Coursera, Udacity and edX it's actually a crowded field now. Great! Large universities move slowly, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who've been pushing for years just to get things to this point. Now things look like they're starting to snowball. It's easy to ignore one university or a crazy startup, but when someone says "hey, uh, half of the Ivy League's on this thing" it gets attention. I'm really looking forward to whatever comes out of edX, but even more to the inevitable answers to edX. It's a great time to need an education.