The courses include recordings of the full lectures of actual college courses, delivered as podcats or even in video.

Some courses also provide supplemental reading, powerpoint presentations, or the like online. Texts are generally not available, but for many subjects, reasonable substitutes are available for free. Actual assigned texts can of course also be purchased.

For the self-motivated student, this is a great and extraordinary bargain: one gets almost all the benefits of a college course, at very little cost.

And in some ways doing this is better that going to actual lectures. The recorded lectures -- if copied to an iPOd -- can also be audited whenever desired, in the car, at the coffee shop, and for whatever length the student finds most convenient: pause a hard section, or listen to several hours of easier material at one sitting.

This sort of auditing misses four major elements present when actually taking the courses: one can't address questions to the instructor, take tests and be graded on them, or get academic credit. The other drawback is that one can't interact with one's fellow students.

I'd like to address that last drawback by forming groups interested in auditing these free courses together, and discussing them.

I'm interested in a variety of subjects, though mostly in the science/engineering side. If you're interested in joining me, let me know what subjects interest you.

Learning things never taught me nothin'.

I'd be very interested in this, though I haven't the foggiest what classes I'd prefer. I'd need to figure out what's available.

I know Stanford and MIT have some online materials, are there others?

Berkeley and Purdue have a bunch of stuff too.

I've been listening to:
A introductory biology from Purdue;
An introductory animal behavior from Berkeley;
An operating system design class from Berkeley.

On my list but not yet listed to:
a biology/botany intro class from Berkeley;
a biology intro class from MIT.

(Stanford also has the Knuth Xmas lectures, which aren't classes but are a series of very meaty single-subject video lectures.)

My basic interests are bio and comp sci. Chemistry (obviously organic more than inorganic), physiology (but bio-based, not hand-waving crap), and cognitive science are also of interest.

Some observations: some of the podcasted lectures make use of visual aids (which can't be seen in the audio podcasts); this makes the lecture a bit harder to follow, but perhaps isn't a drawback, as it forces the listener to imagine the structures being described.

The ability to listen to a lecture on an iPod with Koss earphones, and the ability to pause the lecture whenever your attention flags, really enhances concentration, and makes it possible to listen to more than one class period in succession.

(The Koss plugs are earphones built around ear plugs; while they don't block all external noise, they do a wonderful job of isolating you from distraction. Frankly, I like having the plugs in even if I'm not listening to anything. It's very peaceful.)

I found a catalog for the Teaching Company in the mail the other day. Their courses sound interesting and it seems like they have some good professors. I wonder if this would be a better experience than a traditional school's online offerings which, I think, may be designed for both live and recorded consumption. Anyone tried a course from the Teach Company?

i'd love to do this, but not science. how about philosophy or sociology or anthropology or some other social science type thing? something about people?

Mullacc, head on over to Ask Metafilter and search for any number of existing threads on the Teaching Company. They are very highly regarded. (In fact, one of the political theory courses is taught my the professor who was my mentor and thesis advisor in college.)

something about people?

There is something about people which I do not like. ;)

Biology is all about people. However, I am open to anthro if it's modern and not SSSM crap, or philosophy, if it is Daniel Dennet.

matilda, you were a polisci major who became a coder?

I'd like to avoid the Teaching Company, simply because I'd like to see if we can do this without spending money.

My girlfriend used the online materials from MIT to do intro to macro and microeconomics. She bought the textbooks, did the problem sets. After she finished then, she took a few classes at Berkeley, and now she is in a PhD program.

After watching her, my conclusion is that it can be great if you have a lot of self discipline. She clearly does, and I'm clearly a slacker.

I got that Teaching Company catalog, and I spent some time trying to figure out what their angle was. Seems like mostly classics and history. I wonder if they may be fighting what they see as muliticultural creep with a core curriculum in the (more traditional) humanities.

But then the course selection seemed broad and reasonable, and the profs were from enough different places, that it could just be an honest-to-goodness effort to get some larnin' into some noggins.

I'm still suspicious.

You're entitled to your suspicions, Hugh, but I don't think they have that specific an agenda. I think it's just that the core curriculum is more likely to be what the public wants rather than CultStud or PoMo or whatever is fashionable in the academy but has relatively little impact outside the ivory tower.

And I say this as someone who has done extensive graduate-level work in CultStud and PoMo and gender theory etc. but once I got out of school realized what a silly lot of navel-gazing 90% of that stuff is; people just publishing papers on Madonna or whatnot so they can get that Associate Professorship/get into that conference/sleep with that one hot grad student/etc.

Once you get into over-300-level academic work, you spend so much time specializing; but at the age I am now I kind of regret not having gained a more general knowledge of history and philosophy and the whole millenia-long history of why our world is the way it is. I suspect that a lot of the people who can afford those courses, people who have reached a certain level of comfort career- and wallet-wise, feel similarly, that it's time to broaden their horizons beyond just the topics that their success has been based on.