Hi Ladies Princeton, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania offer free online courses in different areas - computer science , medicine , economics and some more. http://coursera.org/ . Check this link for more details. As I was a IT professional and currently not working, some of the computer courses offered here really helped to keep me busy . I did a course on Database management Systems offered by Stanford 2 months back. It was really challenging and I completed to receive a certificate as well.Ofcourse it is not a stanford certificate but a completion certifcate from the professor who conducted the course. Since this is a free course you cannot expect a university certification but just use this to learn something new. Also there is a free course by google on Python Scripting - http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class I am currently doing this now. Hope it is of some use to ppl looking to kill time usefully .:thumbsup