The thing that got Breakthrough to Learning into MMHS in the first place was making the course available free to anyone on the internet. This seemed to me to be a good use of the digital revolution – and it has certainly paid off.

About twenty years ago I attended a conference organized by the Society of Authors. At this event it became clear that, with the international availability of information through the internet, there was no way that copyright could be defended. This is hard luck for authors but wonderful for readers. My life has been transformed by Wikipedia, another free service set up by people who want to share knowledge without profiting from it (though they seem to be hard up at the moment).

I recently read an exciting article in the Observer by Carole Cadwalladr (11.11.12) that some very prestigious universities are making some of their courses available free on the internet. The Khan Academy offers 3,400 short videos or tutorials, which have been taken up by 10,000,000 students worldwide. I accessed a brilliant course in elementary arithmetic: it operated in the same way as the Language of Ideas, my own computer course*. I understood the relationships between numbers for the first time. Someone else learned all (he says) about entropy in half an hour from one of their courses.

Coursera and Udacity are other sites offering very high level free instruction.

This is a revolution driven by the new technology and one to be welcomed by everybody who has not had the joy of learning knocked out of them by the educational system. Others who will be feeling a little nervous are the English universities who have just raised their fees to £9,000 a year!

It is an unexpected delight to find these sites, already part of the democratization of education.

*www.languageofideas.co.uk