UTMC

Yeah, I said free. Not talking about underwater basket weaving either - here's the class categories being offered by 16 major universities for free online:

Biology & Life Sciences
Computer Science: Programming & Software Engineering
Economics & Finance
Health and Society & Medical Ethics
Mathematics
Statistics, Data Analysis, and Scientific Computing
Business & Management
Computer Science: Systems, Security, Networking
Education
Humanities and Social Sciences
Medicine
Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Vision
Computer Science: Theory
Electrical and Materials Engineering
Information, Technology, and Design
Physical & Earth Sciences

The website is: https://www.coursera.org/

So much for that whole "every leaving my house again" thing. I may be a troglodyte, but I am going to be a fucking well educated troglodyte.

Merlyn

MIT did this a while back, also. Of course, you do not get credits toward a degree...

There's more and more of that around, and that's a good thing.
I think the well established educational institutions are embarrassed into providing such services by the success of the Khan Academy.
Before that, of course, there was (and still is) Open Course Ware, the MIT thing which has expanded to include other institutions.

Other materials are offered by
Rice
University of Michigan
and these guys
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

I like this. Yeah, you can't get a degree this way now, but it's a step in the right direction - you can get the knowledge, which is useful in and off itself. Degrees will eventually come, too, though probably not for free. Still, of the maybe three things which make the internet truly important on a civilization level, putting the sum of man's knowledge at your fingertips is, I think, one of the bigger ones, and these projects go there. Which is awesome.