“Stanford To Offer Free CS and Robotics Courses” from Slashdot yesterday:
Stanford University will soon begin offering a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. Initial courses will provide an introduction to computer science and an introduction to field of robotics, among other topics. The courses, offered under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), are nearly identical to standard courses offered to registered Stanford students and will comprise downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. And get this: all the courses’ materials are being released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This makes Stanford the third (that I know of) major US University to hand out some form of course ware for free. The other two are MIT and UC Berkeley.
MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) offers what it calls MIT Open Courseware and their front page sums it up: “Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds. Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required.” The most popular courses offered appear to be physics and math related with some engineering and economics thrown in. The site and content is (similarly to Stanford’s) stamped with a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license.
UC Berkeley (University of California at Berkeley) has a YouTube channel that includes recorded lectures of a number of their Courses. From Bio Engineering to Political Science, Physics to Law, there is a little bit of everything there. I have watched a number of these courses and I think the selection is great, hopefully it will continue to grow.