An online university has shouldered the modest challenge of taking on the ivy-bedecked likes of Yale and Harvard.

Minerva University is a new learning institution based on a proprietary video platform which will bring students together in live-streamed virtual classrooms. It will have no faculty buildings, libraries, fraternities or sports teams, but will have a dorm for first-years in San Francisco. After their freshman term students will spend the remainder of their studies in six different cities around the world. Minerva University is set to open its doors, or ports, in 2015.

Named for the Roman goddess of wisdom, arts, medicine and poetry; Minerva University has been funded by a $25 million venture capital investment backed by the embattled former president of Harvard, who was forced to resign for saying that women were inept at advanced science. Other investors include Ben Nelson, who has recently made his fortune from the smart-phone application ‘Snapchat’.

Mr Nelson called Minerva “the first elite American university to be launched in a century”, also saying it would “be a school for the very best in the world, for future presidents and thought leaders and cultural icons - it's an awesome responsibility.”

The university is taking on a number of progressive techniques for modern learning; libraries are online, laboratories are borrowed from sister institutions, classes are limited to 19 people and lecturers do not have tenure but will be allowed to keep intellectual property rights for their own research. The university will only accept the most elite applicants, tutelage is set to cost about half that of major Ivy League schools.

Minerva University still needs a few tens of millions of dollars to set up, but founder Ben Nelson says he is hoping to enrol around 200 students for the first term in 2015.