[Homunculiheaded]

why not work within the system you're in? At my university a bunch of grad students got together wanting to do ml/pgm/nlp-class, so we put together a small group, added a semester project plus paper presentations to make it worthy of a grad class. It's a bummer that the coursera courses started so late, but otherwise it's working out great. We help each other out and teach each other new stuff, and in the end get credit ;)

If you can't get departmental approval for something like that, then you should at least be able to swing an easily justifiable independent study out of one of the free classes.

[milesstevenson]

That's a damn good idea. Gonna ask my advisor about it Monday.