Free Online College Courses

Two months into my job loss, thanks to the wonderful, poorly managed, big name defense company, who shall remain nameless, I'm getting a little bored. The first month wasn't so bad as I had some contract work to keep me busy. The second month I've had to keep myself occupied. Kind of relaxing and not so bad, but it would be much better if my time was being paid for.
I'm trying to keep my brain fresh by learning some new things. Turns out there are tons of free learning resources online. Colleges even offer free courses.
MIT has a whole bunch of free online courses ranging from economics to anthropology to chemistry to computer science. The courses offer lecture notes, assignments & solutions, online textbooks, exams & solutions, image galleries and/or mulitmedia content. Each course offers a subset of those features, so you don't get everything, but some of the courses do have a lot of useful information for learning.
Stanford has a few really great, free computer science/engineering courses online.
Another great site for free online courses is http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses. A lot of these courses are audio or video versions of course lectures. Some have transcripts of the lectures.
A list of several other colleges who offer free online courses can be found here and here.
Online courses are a great way to refresh your memory or learn something new, for free, at your own pace. So much to learn, so little time.


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