Want to brush up on your crafting and DIY skills but have trouble finding available classes in your area? Never fear, here comes the Internet to the rescue, yet again! For a monthly fee of $25 — way less money than many in-person resources — you can have unlimited access to the video workshops of Creativebug.

Hoping to be the go-to source on the Internet for art and craft instruction, Creativebug offers dozens of online courses on everything from introductory screen printing to beginner's crocheting to needle-felted Peeps — yep, like the marshmallow candy. If crafting tutorials at any hour of the day from your own home wasn't exciting enough, the site donates five percent of all subscription revenues to nonprofit art organizations.

After seeing the success of a personal experiment offering a free Stanford University-certified artificial intelligence course (23,000 people completed the class!), Sebastian Thrun left his prestigious professor position to dedicate himself to teaching on a much larger scale. His new program, Udacity will offer free university-level computer science classes to anyone interested in advancing their tech knowledge.

The two courses currently up for the taking are "CS 101: Building a Search Engine" and "CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car." But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to free online classes. Here, a list of places to point your web browser for free classes online, so you can soak up all the knowledge your brain can handle.

• Yale Open Courses — Named one of Time magazine's top 50 websites of 2011, Yale's classes allow anyone to browse through lectures and course materials in subjects including engineering, chemistry, astronomy, sociology, Spanish, history, and more.
• MIT OpenCourseWare — With over 2,000 courses available at your fingertips, MIT OpenCourseWare should be your first (and maybe your only) stop in online learning.
• Online Education Database — This website offers up a list of 200 free classes you can take online. Take some physics classes and learn about the phenomenon of superconductivity, or retake that algebra class you struggled with in high school.
• OpenCulture — This website offers up a list of free classes from top universities like Stanford and UC Berkeley, and even some video lectures you can find on YouTube.
• Harvard Open Learning — Watch videos of lectures on computer science and abstract algebra, among others
• Princeton Web Media — Browse through and take in archived lectures from Princeton's math, science, and engineering departments, and lots, lots more.

See more websites to get your online learning on after the break.

Even if you've been out of school for years, there's no need to feel left out while watching kids head back to the classroom, as you have a free resource to get your learning on. iTunes U, available through the iTunes store, offers content from over 1,000 universities, and nearly half of these schools including those known for stellar science programs like Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge among others, offer course lectures to the general public. Download these video classes if you've always wanted to spout astrophysics and computer programming knowledge like an expert. Also looking for French help or history lessons? Take some time browsing through class offerings; with hundreds available, there's something for everyone.

1. Astrophysics: Frontiers and Controversies, Yale — Focusing on three areas of astronomy: extra-solar planets, black holes, and dark energy, this course pays special attention to how astronomers are learning more in the field and what is still unknown in the universe.
2. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — For students with no previous programming experience, in 24 lectures this course teaches how to write small Python language-based small programs.
3. Developing Apps For iOS, Stanford — Intended for students with a background in C-language computer programming, this course teaches how to create efficient applications for Apple's iOS platform through lecture videos and PDF documents.
4. Women's Health, University of California campuses — Learn more about promoting personal health straight from the prestigious doctors and researchers from the University of California colleges. Lectures include tips for stress, diabetes in women, and research on aging.

There's an increasing number of paid and free online classes you can take to learn a new trade, brush up on your calculus skills, and even learn a language, but are online classes the best way to go? For some, it takes the edge off of the skyrocketing tuition costs in the US (since you can sometimes find online classes at a lower price). While for others, it's a great idea in theory but requires huge amounts of self-discipline to complete. Here, we'll take a look at the pros and cons of online learning verses the traditional college education. Which is right for you?

Pros

1. It's applicable to the real world and the pace of business. More workers are telecommuting full-time and learning in an online environment requires the same self-discipline as working solo from home.
2. You can learn from anywhere. You don't have to be at school to go to school, which would be exceptionally helpful during busy holiday travel seasons or any other time a last-minute trip to mom and dad's is necessary.
3. It could lower costs for students and institutions. Online classes may translate to lots of online reading material, eliminating the need for the pricey trip to the campus bookstore (and the sore arms that go along with carrying a semester's worth of books).
4. It could encourage more interaction. It seems counterintuitive, but an online forum can give shier students a chance to be heard, allow for easier discussion of potentially controversial subjects, and make it easier and more efficient for a student to approach a professor. Goodbye, crazy lines during office hours.
5. A student's program can be tailored to individual needs. If you're not a morning person, a 9 a.m. class could be torture. If you have access to an online lecture 24/7, you can tune in when your brain is fully awake, meaning better performance and retention.

Cons

1. Your living room may not be the best place to learn. Though learning at your own pace and time can seem like the optimal situation, there's something to be said for getting out of your house and into a classroom, away from distractions like the Internet, TV, and, of course, your bed.
2. In fact, you may just never leave your room. Moving around on campus = forced interaction = a better social situation. Plus, exercise!
3. You might miss out on meeting awesome new people. While online classes allow you to interact with others through your computer, you'll miss that oh-so-important face time with your peers.
4. Speaking of face time, you won't get as much of it with your professor, either. All colleges are different, but many feature at least some smaller classes where your absence or lack of participation is noticed quickly by the professor. This may encourage you to work harder, show up completely prepared for class, and in-class participation.

In an effort to make up my mind on how I feel about online college classes, yesterday I wrote up five reasons I think they're a good idea. Now, here are five reasons I'm not sure they're so great.

To be clear, I'm talking about online classes for traditional college students – that is, students attending a four-year undergraduate school — not nontraditional students working on an online degree (the list of "pros" in that list is much greater!). Check them out after the jump.

Ever since I read The New York Times piece about online college classes, I've been going back and forth on whether or not I think it's a good idea. The article opens with details of a lecture broadcasted online to 1,500 students because they can't all fit in the classroom. While undergrads are still traditionally enrolled students that often live in dorms and have the same experiences one would have at any school, I don't think it'll be long before many colleges and universities take their classes completely online. Maybe I'm a traditionalist in the sense that I think undergrad is suppose to include things like cafeterias, communal lounges, and warm-weather classes held on the lawn. But, there is a good case for why the online model would work, too. After the break, five reasons online college classes are a good idea.