I'm curious what courses any of you have audited (is that the right word for this?) through OCW or the other recent online offerings.
I was taking a course on regex compiler design at Stanford long ago before they locked down their student access system. In that case they weren't meaning to share. Nice format though, video + coordinated slides in a two up view. Stanford iphone development and some Berkeley/Yale philosophy courses since then. Nothing yet from OCW.
I had started to follow "Introduction to Algorithms" (http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/mit.edu....) but I dropped out… It's mostly that I never took the time to listen to it as a class and more like a regular podcast, while I needed to really sit down and concentrate.
I recently started to watch the iPhone Application Programming from Stanford (http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.s...) and it is really great. For an introduction to Objective-C and iPhone development, so far it has been very, very well done. Most (if not all) speakers are actually Apple engineers.
That kind of initiatives is really great because honestly, Stanford can have a class given by Apple engineers pretty easily (in that they are very close by), but it would be quite difficult for any other college in the world, regardless of the quality of the school.
Open Yale's ECON 252 - Financial Markets by Professor Robert Shiller was very interesting. It includes also some top notch visiting lectures, e.g. by Carl Icahn, Stephen Schwarzman and David Swensen.
ECON 159 - Game Theory by Professor Ben Polak is very thorough.
Both are video-based, no materials required. Questionnaire pdfs between "classes" for recap.
This has been around for a while but it's impressive how much it has grown since its humble beginnings in 2002. It's also exciting to see how this has inspired other schools like Stanford (http://itunes.stanford.edu/) and the iTunes U initiative.
I think we'll be seeing a lot more schools starting to follow suit and an opportunity emerge within Open Source Education.
There's another problem though, I don't live in the US and the only way to buy the books is through something like Amazon, shipping from the US. If you add shipping and taxes (local taxes here), books become really expensive.
It's why I mentioend previous edition of the book. For very common courses, it can be next to nothing for the book. I'm talking $10 vs $80 for current editions.
is also good. Only videos though, sometimes a link to additional material.
More courses (mostly European)
http://videolectures.net/
A simple search page:
http://ocwfinder.com/
EDIT: Another link added.