Last year (aka 25 days ago) I wrote about MIT opening up all of the material from their 1,800 courses on the web, and they did it simply because MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone. While such ideals are often spoken of in higher education, in practice universities can actually act much different, and it was nice to see this major institution put their money where their mouth is on this front.

Just before the New Year there was an update on how the “open experiment”has been going – one million hits per month, with 1/2 of these from outside the U.S. My favorite quote is the one at the end of the article from “Michael from rural Hagerstown”:

“Your website has contributed hundreds of hours to my education in physics as well as biology. Discovering and utilizing MIT’s OpenCourseWare site was like finding $40,000 sitting on a park bench.”

Amazing stuff – and the $40,000 on the park bench transitions nicely into this story in the NY Times (by Eric Konigsberg) about Harvard’s latest attempt to deal with an assortment of class divisions, as they offer to provide significant scholarship support to families with household incomes between $120 and $180 K (i.e. enough to be a pretty rich family, but not quite enough to carry a $45 K annual tuition bill, while generally too much to qualify for financial support).

Now as the article covers in great detail, remenants of certain “internal” barriers will likely exist for the upper middle class kids that will benefit from this (refer to the part of the article about the point is not Harvard, but which Harvard?), but at minimum it’s another positive step in the right direction for the top U.S. universities – and the type of decision that might help bring society together at a time when many different forces seem bent on pulling it apart.