I’ve written before about sites that introduce school kids to programming, but these four sites offer college-level programming for free. All of these resources are Massive Open Online Courses (called MOOCs) that serve thousands of students at a time, and certainly shaking up our old definitions of higher education!
1) MIT Open Courseware These classes are taught by MIT professors, but they do not accrue any college credits.
2) Coursera is an online education platform that partners with about twenty universities from around the world. Again, no college credit, but no tuition costs either!
3) edX is another free platform that offers classes from a variety of universities.
4) Code Academy is an independent organization that offers a variety of introductory programming classes. They don’t offer the same depth of study as the university affiliated MOOCs, but they can be a great place to start.