iTunes U: university lectures for free

At Apple's iTunes online store, Britney Spears and Shakespeare are separated by just a few clicks. While an episode of "Desperate Housewives" will cost $1.99, a series of lectures by renowned University of California-Berkeley philosophy professor Hubert Dreyfus is absolutely free. A single song by pop diva Rihanna is 99 cents. The price of a course on modern theoretical physics by Stanford University quantum mechanics professor Leonard Susskind? Free!!!.

Apple calls it iTunes U, an unsung but popular feature of iTunes. Audio and video downloads of classroom lectures are available to anyone who wants to listen to them through a computer or an iPod. Though the program has existed on a smaller scale for a few years, it now offers more than 50,000 audio and video tracks - course lectures, language lessons, speeches - from scores of universities and colleges. Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Yale are there. Beginning in the fall, both UC-Berkeley and Stanford are planning expansions to their respective digital lecture programs.

Go to iTunes U in the iTunes Store.