Jealous?

What if Georgetown wasn’t your first choice? You spend your afternoons wistfully daydreaming about tweed jacketed professors and elegant 17th century classrooms. Sure, Georgetown is a great school…but just look at US News  & World Report’s rankings, which are definitely the best way to judge a university’s curriculum (read: sarcasm). Should the cost of attending such prestigious universities, your SAT scores, aversion to cold weather, or ivy allergy prevent you from taking advantage of these schools premier courses?

Academic Earth doesn’t think so. The site, currently in Beta, offers online streaming courses from America’s best universities for free.

No course fees, no books, and no constant interruptions from overeager freshmen (you know who you are, 3rd row Macroecon.) The project is the brainchild of 22 year old Richard Ludlow, who was named among BusinessWeek’s Best Young Entrepreneurs last year.

While other companies, like iTunes U, have already thrown down the gauntlet for open source education, Academic Earth has a semester’s worth of full lectures of a single class instead of just a series of different guest speakers. This format is more like actually going to class—which is a good thing, right?

Photo taken from Flickr user superfem using a Creative Commons license.