Just a quick fyi. In the past week, Stanford has launched the latest version of Coding Together, the popular course that teaches Stanford students — and now students worldwide — how to build apps for the iPhone and iPad.

It seems like not a week goes by without The New York Times writing a gushing profile about Coursera. It’s hard to believe, but back during another day, there was another darling of the open education movement. And his name was Walter Lewin.

Are you on the hunt for a free, open source platform that will let you deliver free online courses? We’ve already told you about one option: Google Course Builder. Now here’s another: Stanford’s Class2Go. The platform is open, meaning that you can grab the code base for free and run it on your very own server.

January — it’s a time for New Year’s resolutions and for university courses to get started again. It’s happening on campuses. And it’s happening online. Right now, the biggest batch of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are getting underway: 65 courses in total, across seven different online platforms.

Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not.

Back in 2009, Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel made his course, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, available on the web for free (YouTube - iTunes - Web). Suddenly lifelong learners around the world had access to a popular course enjoyed by more than 14,000 Harvard students over 30 years.

Salman Khan’s model for free online education hinges on the micro lecture—brief tutorials on nearly every subject under the sun—delivered through YouTube. Launched in 2006, the Khan Academy now has a library of 3000 videos.

First thing you need to know: Before doing anything else, you should simply click “play” and start watching the video above. It doesn’t take long for Robert Sapolsky, one of Stanford’s finest teachers, to pull you right into his course. Better to watch him than listen to me.

Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, became something of an internet celebrity because of his knack for presenting data in extremely imaginative ways. As you’ll see above, he’s the master of data visualization.

We took our collection of 550 Free Online Courses from Great Universities and did a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the total number of hours of free audio/video lectures it offers. A conservative estimate puts it north of 15,000 hours.