What if going to class was as easy as getting online? If attending lecture took no more effort than surfing the web? Well, wait, nevermind—the increasingly wide world of online education has already made that change, with demonstrable benefits to students. So let me revise the question.

What if attending lecture felt like surfing the web … what if, when you got curious about something and you wanted to understand more about it, you could listen to a lecture and learn exactly what you wanted, just like you know how to hop online and find a used computer to buy or send your vegetarian friend a recipe for White Castle casserole or watch a preview for the new Wolverine movie?

That would be new. Rather, it is new, and it’s here now:

Academic Earth is a “user-friendly platform for educational video that [lets anyone] freely access instruction from scholars and guest lecturers at leading academic universities,” reports Leena Rao on washingtonpost.com. Rao notes that Academic Earth “offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton” and that lectures can be “browsed by subject, university, or instructor … editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as Understanding the Financial Crisis and First Day Of Freshman Year.”

Now this is a game-changer. This isn’t about having access to lectures limited to a particular area of study or a certain professor. This is you or me overhearing a conversation about black holes and remembering that we’ve wanted for a long time to understand even very basically what people are talking about when they talk about black holes. So head over to Academic Earth, and, not a moment later, we’re sitting in a lecture called Introduction to Astrophysics given by Dr. Charles Bailyn at Yale. For free. I repeat: YALE; for FREE.

Or maybe you’re feeling not so much like a space geek, just now. Perhaps you’d rather luxuriate in the romantic language of love—not because you’re mushy, but because you like to read and you’re a curious person and you want to understand how things got to be as they are. Click on over to John Rogers’ lecture Poetry and Marriage:

Academic Earth is in its infancy—it’s only going to get better. Part of being user-friendly is how they let users grade any given lecture, so you know what others have thought of it going in. As the site develops, and as schools grow wider and smarter about raising their profile by providing access to quality online content for free, what we can experience and learn online will continue to grow. And the learning experience will become increasingly close to our fingertips—in all, a neat development for your own ongoing edification, and especially as an assistant in your own online education experience.