Ideas for A-Z pickers

I've been asked to come up with a 'course picker' that lets a student find a course.

One alternative is to have a text box in which the student enters the first three letters of the course and a look-ahead function presents the student with a few options to choose from.

This is a good pattern and is one we will think about as an option.

Another idea was to have an A-Z list

The student selects a letter and all the courses for that letter are displayed below the A-Z list. The problem with this pattern is that if the number of courses under a certain letter is large (>10) it can become pretty unusable.

Has anyone got a good way to display information from an A-Z list?