Yale University  will soon offer videos of some of its courses available for free, in an 18 month pilot project supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The project will also offer lecture transcripts in several languages, syllabi and other course materials. (Yale to Make Select Courses Available on the Internet; Yale to offer free web courses.)

There are several universities now offering course materials online in a systematic way.

UC Berkeley has been offering video webcasts for a wide range of its courses since 2001. Many of the videos contain closed captions, and the university also makes MP3 files (podcasts) of the lectures available. These resources are all available from webcast.berkeley. Another Californian university, UCLA, also offers occasional webcasts for its lectures.

MIT's OpenCourseWare project is now a couple of years old. It provides access to all kinds of materials from the university's courses, including lecture notes, online text books, applets, assignments and exams.

Rice University oversees a project, called Connexions, which aims to hold course materials under a Creative Commons license. Courses on the Connexions site are university-independent, and many of the courses can be read the way one reads a textbook.

Alongside these efforts, many universities allow their lecturers to post course materials online, though most of these materials are not well organised, nor accessible from a central university portal.

Australian universities. As for Australian universities, there doesn't seem to be any systematic effort to offer course materials freely online, although several lecturers do make their lecture notes available. Disappointingly, there seems to be a rush towards walling up course content for university students only (particularly with my own university). This is incredibly short-sighted, and at odds with the public funding that still makes up a significant portion of income for Australian universities. I truly hope that our universities will wake up to the wonderful opportunity for showing off their (course) wares to the world, just as the above universities have.