Dimdim, an open source web conferencing provider that we've covered many times, launched what it is billing as "an easy webinar service" today. Dimdim has long competed closely with proprietary web conferencing services such as WebEx, and its new service will provide personalized webinar platforms for webinars delivered to up to 1,000 people. In conjunction with the new service, Dimdim has struck a partnership with Eventbrite, which does event management and ticketing, so that anyone delivering webinars can find avenues to make money with them.

We've reported before on how big universities such as U.C. Berkeley, as well as publishing companies such as CNet have used the open source Moodle platform to deliver e-learning content online. M.I.T.'s Open Courseware site, and its M.I.T. World video effort, are also notable for providing excellent, free educational content online. Meanwhile, the United States is the single largest e-learning market worldwide with revenues exceeding $17.5 billion in 2007, according to a report from Global Industry Analysts. Now, U.C. Berkeley is funding the development of an open source project for expanded distribution of free recordings of lectures and other events, as the San Francisco Business Times reports. There are other notable free e-learning initiatives underway, too.

We've written about free e-learning resources and tools, such as Moodle, several times here on OStatic, as well as collections of open source tutorials. Many universities are picking up on the fact that it is easy to use free, open source tools such as Moodle to provide classes online that anyone can take. U.C. Berkeley provides free online classes based on Moodle, and M.I.T. has a collection of over 1,900 free courses on its MITOpenCourseware site, many on tech topics. MITWorld also has a searchable database of free, educational videos. Here are some notable examples of classes and seminars that may be of interest to you.