The BBC reported recently that Oxford and Cambridge are going to make some of their lectures available on iTunes. My old university UCL have a good history of making their lectures accessible – their free-for-all Lunch Hour Lectures were on when I was a student there and they’ve already got a lot of content on iTunes U.
One of my favourite things about studying at UCL was the ‘intercollegiate’ nature of the lectures. In the Philosophy department we shared our lectures with Kings College and Birkbeck so had access their staff, could go along to Heythrop’s philosophy club and we had access to all the University of London’s libraries including Senate House. There was also the Aristotelian Society whose lectures were attended by my own lecturers – there’s literally no better place in the world to study Philosophy because London’s huge resources are shared.
In the same spirit, my favourite academic moment was attending a lecture given by Roger Penrose at Senate House. It wasn’t associated with any university and I think it was free – the auditorium was only 2/3 full though and I thought it a bit of a shame because Penrose was fantastic. He talked about black holes and pointed at cone-shaped diagrams and glossed over the maths behind it all and I came out feeling like I’d been let into a little corner of Physics – a discipline I’d never be able to study normally.
That’s why I’m so excited about Oxbridge finally putting their lectures online. A lot of us haven’t been to university, or if we have we never studied everything we’d have liked to. Books like Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion are best-sellers but that’s the only insight we ever get into the real Academia behind it all – the conversations and debates that give rise to the theories we’re all so familiar with. Until now!
We’ve now got access to the minds behind ‘common knowledge’ and we can join in with their debates. You don’t need thousands of pounds to go to university any more, and learning doesn’t stop just because you’ve left. Hooray for iTunes U!
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