Several universities world-wide have made their courseware available in different formats over the years. A very popular format is that of podcasts on iTunesU or video lectures on Youtube. See, for instance, this broad list of “free courseware” offerings by major universities. Yale, for example, has made several past lectures available on their Open Yale website. The Open University lets students try course materials for free on their OpenLearn resources page, which. Often, these courses are nothing but pre-recorded videos and audio elements (not full interactive courses) made public by the universities as a form of community outreach (which is already great, don’t get me wrong).

However, Stanford University is blazing trails for open online courseware. Anyone (as long as they understand the recommended prerequisites)can sign up to take some of their courses online, free of charge in the Spring semester of 2012. The courses will consist of live lectures (which can also be see later in an archive), quizzes, and forums in which online students can ask questions.

The current Spring 2012 semester offerings include courses on an eclectic variety subjects ranging from Computer Science to Game Theory, from Anatomy to Linguistics:

Computer Science 101
by Nick Parlante

http://cs101-class.org

Software Engineering for Software as a Service (SAAS)
by Armando Fox and David Patterson

http://saas-class.org/

Game Theory
by Matthew O. Jackson and Yoav Shoham

http://game-theory-class.org

Natural Language processing
by Dan Jurafsky and Christopher Manning

http://nlp-class.org

Probabilistic Graphical Models
by Daphne Koller

http://pgm-class.org/

Human-Computer interfaces
by Scott Klemmer

http://hci-class.org/

Machine Learning
by Andrew Ng

http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

Technology Entrepreneurship
by Chuck Eesley

http://entrepreneur-class.org/

The Lean Launchpad
by Steve Blank

http://launchpad-class.org/

Cryptography
by Professor Dan Boneh

http://crypto-class.org/

Information Theory
by Tsachy (Itschak) Weissman

http://infotheory-class.org/

Anatomy
by Dr. Sakti Sirivastava

http://anatomy-class.org/

Design and Analysis of Algorithms I
by Tim Roughgarden

http://algo-class.org/

Making Green Buildings
by Professor Martin Fischer

http://greenbuilding-class.org/

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List adapted from The Rohan Aurora blog.