In 1986's Back To School, Thornton Melon, played triumphantly by Rodney Dangerfield, re-enters college midway through life to help his flunking son finish a degree.[rssbreak]
In the process, the fun-loving Melon rediscovers the joys of university life - least of which is learning.
And just like the hero of the classic film, I, too, have rediscovered learning, inspired by both Dangerfield and an impressive site called Academic Earth.
With this site, I can essentially take courses at UC Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale all at the same time, for free.
It launched earlier this year with 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1,300 hours).
I can take in lectures on such heady subjects as the Peloponnesian War, hear a psychology talk on the nature of happiness and complete courses in game theory via streaming. I can download them as MP3s onto my iPhone or print out syllabuses and reading lists. All without setting foot in an actual lecture hall.
Academic Earth is part of a larger movement to make higher education available outside the confines of exclusive institutions -specifically those that charge close to $60,000 per year to attend.
Richard Ludlow, Academic Earth's founder, was a student at one such institution, Yale, when he thought up the site. The 22-year-old's ultimate goal is to make university education so widely accessible that it will force down the cost of tuition.
In grade schools, a movement called "clicks, not bricks" aims to save money and lower class size by educating at least some students online.
Back at the post-graduate level, there's still some debate about whether streaming lectures is effective.
Professor Steve Joordens of the department of psychology at University of Toronto has studied the matter.
"Our research shows that being able to pause and rewind lectures can be helpful in introductory breadth courses like introductory psychology, where the focus is on memorizing the terminology, concepts, procedures and theories in a field," says Joordens.
But he says students using video to study advanced subjects like calculus only learned in a "surface" way, without grasping the deeper concepts involved.
Student satisfaction does rate high, he admits.
At Ryerson, Professor Steven Gedeon, director of the school's Entrepreneur Institute, tells me he streams all his lectures and is in the process of making a public database of videos to help entrepreneurs of all stripes, not just Ry-High students.
Neither school's online lectures are as satisfying as Academic Earth's - or repeated viewings of Back To School.
But when I was at university only a few years ago, it seemed like the only technology my professors used were shortcuts for marking, like the dubious TurnItIn.com, a plagiarism-check site. So both these professors are at least making progress, which is refreshing.