Ever have an interest in a topic but don’t have the time or money to take an extra course?  You could always take a free course online.  As video taping lectures becomes more and more prominent, many universities are posting the lectures free of charge on the internet.  MIT’s Open Course ware is probably the largest collection.  Not only are these lectures great for learning a few extra things, they are also useful in reinforcing what you are learning in your own courses.  For example you are taking a computer science course, and you are having difficulty understanding the professor.  Well you can go and find a computer science course from another university and watch their lectures.  Maybe listening to someone else explain the material will make things click.  Below is a compilation of some places to get different courses.

MIT OpenCourseWare

Most definitely the most comprehensive selection of courses with over 1800 courses offered, some from each program offered at MIT.  Unfortunately not all of these courses are video taped.  Probably about 200+ of them have video and/or audio.  But each course has the required readings(with link to Amazon page for the book), copies of the quizzes and exams, lecture notes, problem sets, and sometimes additional material.  So if you are just trying to find a good book on a topic, go over to OpenCourseWare and see what MIT requires for the course.  Or if you just need some additional notes, you might find what you need.

Academic Earth

AcademicEarth.org is a relatively new site which compiles lectures/courses from many of the top Universities (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale).  The lectures can be found on the university pages too (the MIT courses are taken right from OpenCourseWare), but as Academic Earth grows it may be the best place to find any lecture you want.  Academic Earth also allows you to create an account so you can add lectures to your favorites  and you  can give the lectures/course a grade.

Harvard’s Computer Science 50

I have been going through this course in my spare time, and it is one of the greatest free courses I have ever seen.  The course is taught by Professor Malan.  He makes the course very exciting, adds internet memes, and actually teaches the material well.  If you are just starting out as a computer science major or maybe you would just like to learn some programming, you should most definitly check this course out.  You can find it at AcademicEarth(older lectures) or at the cs50.net.