Dear Nairalander, Theres now an online courses offered by Princeton University and Stanford University free of charge to anyone with an internet access worldwide. I just find out the info through my weekly Paper subscription newspaper - NEWSWEEK- And i think i should share with my my fellow nigerians. Its just been launched last April, but has not yet circulated the online community. Go to Coursera.org

Coursera is an educational for-profit company founded by professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California. It has recently received $16 million of Series A venture capital from L. John Doerr at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Scott Sandell of New Enterprise Associates . Coursera says it is "committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it". The business model has not been made public, but John Doerr has suggested that people will pay for "valuable, premium services".

Coursera was launched shortly after Udacity -- a similar venture by former Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun, and shortly before edX, a similar not-for-profit initiative by MIT and Harvard.

Coursera has created partnerships with universities including University of Stanford; Michigan; Princeton; and Pennsylvania, and provides free online courses in the fields of Computer Science; Healthcare, Medicine and Biology; Society, Networks and Information; Humanities and Social Science; Mathematics and Statistics; and Economic, Finance and Business. Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. In most humanities and social science courses, and other assignments where an objective standard may not be possible, a peer review system is used.

WWW.COURSERA.ORG