Oxford University Department for Continuing Education (OUDCE) is a department within the University of Oxford that caters mainly for part-time and mature students. It is located at Rewley House, Wellington Square, Oxford, England.
Some 15,000 students comprise the Department, of which roughly 5,000 study for an Oxford University award or credit-bearing course. Other types of course offered by the Department include online courses, short courses, weekly classes, day and weekend courses and summer schools.
The University of Oxford was one of the founders, in the late 19th century, of the so-called 'extension' movement, wherein Universities began to offer educational opportunities to adult learners outside of their traditional student base. The 19th Century saw an awakening social awareness to the needs of working-class people generally, and Oxford University signalled an educational responsibility to the general community by sending lecturers into towns and cities across Victorian England, bringing university culture to a diverse adult audience. The first of the early "Oxford Extension Lectures" was delivered in 1878, and by 1893 Oxford University Extension Centres were bringing adult education to much of England, plus a few cities in Wales.
In 1927, the University purchased Rewley House on Wellington Square in Oxford as the permanent base of what was then known as the "University of Oxford Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies", and which later was renamed as the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. During the 1990s, Kellogg College was co-located here.
Famous quotes containing the words oxford, university, department, continuing and/or education:
“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all ... like an opera.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.”
—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)