Interesting Slashdot story

Carnegie Mellon Starts Offering Courses Online

OckNock writes "Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT's OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, ...

Also in the comments, a few links to other interesting online courses provided by universities, including a bunch of webcast lectures from UC Berkeley. Together with the associated websites for the courses containing [I guess] lectures notes, coursework assignments etc, then all you're really missing is the direct interactivity with the teacher [although with a class size of 200 and 1 lecturer and 4 TA's, how much direct contact are you really going to get ?]. Oh, and the community. And I wonder whether weblogs, IM, newsgroups, etc can overcome that.