Popular Science:

I was not screwing around. When I took the first physics class of my life, at age 35, it was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and my professor was Walter Lewin, one of that institution’s most respected instructors. Lewin is a man so comfortable with his vectors that he diagrams them in front of a classroom audience while wearing Teva sandals.
OK, I wasn’t really “at” MIT. And “took” the class may be a stretch. I was watching the video of one of Lewin’s lectures from the comfort of my backyard in Brooklyn, and I too was wearing sandals (but not Tevas; I have standards).
Lewin is the breakout star of MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) program, what the school calls a “Web publication” of virtually every class taught in its hallowed halls. For his dynamic teaching and frequent stunts (building a human pendulum, firing golf balls at glass panels), he’s been downloaded by physics enthusiasts around the globe and profiled on the front page of the New York Times as the first luminary of online open learning. The professor’s fans are examples of a new type of student participating in a new kind of education, one built around the vast library of free online courseware offered by many of the world’s temples of higher learning, as well as museums, nonprofit organizations and other knowledgeable benevolents.