A while ago I came across the news that Stanford University had made available what they’re calling Stanford Engineering Everywhere, or SEE for short. SEE offers 10 of Standford’s most popular Computer Science classes on-line, in a self paced manner, for free.
The classes are split into three groups, Introduction to Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Linear Systems and Optimizations. The course descriptions are available in the link above.
So, if I wanted (and I do), you could invest time to take these classes from Stanford for free. Now, it’s important to realize that you do not get anytime with instructors. Instead you can watch videos of the class lectures. However, you have access to the same lectures, assignments, exams and more used by Stanford students. And, to make up for the lack of instructor input, you have access to online communities to ask questions to.
Finally, and this is what I think is coolest, the work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This allows anyone to essentially to reuse, remix or rework the materials for non commercial purposes. Overall, I need to find a way to shave out an extra hour or two of my day to work through these classes!