Ever want to attend a world-class university like Stanford or Harvard but don't have the time, opportunity or grades? Now, thanks to the magic of podcasts, all you need is a portable audio player and an Internet connection to enjoy the growing body of online lecture courses provided for free by top colleges.

As the podcast snowball continues rolling — podcast users accounted for 12 percent of the Net's population in 2006 — universities are beginning to jump on the bandwagon. Now, everyday folks around the world can listen to lectures like “Geography of World Cultures,” “The Historical Jesus” or “European Civilization From the Renaissance to the Present.”

Top-tier schools, including Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley, offer many undergraduate courses online, while some Ivy League institutions, such as Columbia, Yale and Princeton, allow you to sample speeches, workshops and seminars by the likes of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and author Steven Levitt (“Freakonomics”).

You may not be able to earn a degree, but you will be able to explore a new area of interest, freshen up your high school French or impress someone at your next dinner party.

Berkeley's goal, said Adam Hochman, project manager of the university's webcast site, is to make nearly all lecture classes with more than 50 students into free podcasts.

But some institutions are more wary of sharing too much. At Rutgers University, for example, a handful of professors do use podcasts and other multimedia content to teach, but they limit the use of these materials to registered students.

“The problem with courses is that (the university) can't always make (the content) public,” said Charles Hedrick, director of Internet Research and Technology at Rutgers, noting that lectures are the intellectual property of the professors who give them. “They don't have the rights to do it.”

 Over the past year, Hochman has received letters of thanks from around the world, including one from a Mormon carpenter, another from a physics department of a Russian university and a missive from a U.S. Navy sailor deployed in Iraq.

“Your lectures have been a lifeline for me,” the seaman wrote.

Evelyn Shih | The Record (Bergen County, N.J.)