This is nothing short of impressive. Last April, UC Berkeley, one of the premiere universities in the country, announced its plan to put complete academic courses on iTunes. Fast forward nine months, and you can already find 59 full courses available as podcasts. Simply click here to access Berkeley's iTunes site (or here for the Rss feed).No matter where you live, you can access at no cost the very same courses attended by students paying full tuition. And, given the critical mass of courses being offered across a range of disciplines, you can put together your own personalized curriculum and expand your horizons on the fly.

If the humanities are your thing, you can take US History: From Civil War to Present, Existentialism in Literature & Film, or European Civilization from the Renaissance to Present. If you're into the social sciences, you may want to consider World Religions, Peoples and States, US Foreign Policy after 9/11, Human Emotions, or Introduction to Statistics. Turning to the hard sciences, you can take your pick from Physics for Future Presidents, Introduction to Chemistry, General Astronomy, and General Biology. Finally, for those with a technology bent, you can consider listening in on An Introduction to Computers, The History of Information or even The Foundations of American CyberCulture. But, if these particular courses aren't for you, there are many more to choose from.

Berkeley's collection has generally remained off of people's radar screen, which is too bad. It's an excellent podcast collection, one of the best out there. Hopefully we can help readers find out what they are missing.

For more, please see our collection of Free Courses from top universities.