Headline in the Washington Post:

Online revolution at elite universities makes courses available for free to all

Excerpt:

Brian Caffo teaches a public-health course at Johns Hopkins University that he calls a “mathematical biostatistics boot camp.” It typically draws a few dozen graduate students. Never more than 70.

This fall, Caffo was swarmed. He had 15,000 students.

They included Patrycja Jablonska in Poland, Ephraim Baron in California, Mohammad Hijazi in Lebanon and many others far from Baltimore who ordinarily would not have a chance to study at the elite Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They logged on to a Web site called Coursera and signed up. They paid nothing for it.

Yeah, this model — giving away content — has worked well for the newspaper industry. Ha.