Stanford University allows people from all over the world to take the Introduction to Databases course over the web. The course is offered for free (for a limited period of time).
This is a great opportunity for every person who is not familiar with how databases work to acquire this knowledge for free. I believe this initiative will be the first of many similar ones.
Going over the syllabus I believe I would have introduced few changes. It seems that they mix into the same course both SQL and XML (+XML related topics). The course covers all basic topics in SQL itself.. which is more than enough (SQL is one of the simplest topics people can learn by themselves). Database design in UML… that sounds a move in the right direction if they only chose to cover ORM (this is the way things work these days)… teaching UML in the context of databases without getting into ORM is as if we were teaching Java without teaching OOP. Regarding NoSQL I would have chosen to cover it a bit more than just mentioning it… especially in the expense of XML.
