I don't know how useful that opencourseware will be to you. There are other free resources on the Internet. http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/ This is a free e-book written by a professional programmer that teaches basic programming, primarily using python. For more info on learning Python, there are lots of resources such as the official tutorial at the Python web site: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ There are other tutorials too, such as Python Rocks!: http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/stories/00020.html Also, the free e-book http://diveintopython.org/ "Dive Into Python" (intended for experienced programmers), and http://www.ibiblio.org/swaroopch/byteofpython/read/ "A Byte of Python".