Oxford University Department For Continuing Education

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:

    “The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.”
    —Robertson Davies (b. 1913)

    “To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft upon the man’s nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.”
    —William Booth (1829–1912)

    “In the great department store of life, baseball is the toy department.”
    —Los Angeles Sportscaster. quoted in Independent Magazine (London, Sept. 28, 1991)

    “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)

    “Whatever may be our just grievances in the southern states, it is fitting that we acknowledge that, considering their poverty and past relationship to the Negro race, they have done remarkably well for the cause of education among us. That the whole South should commit itself to the principle that the colored people have a right to be educated is an immense acquisition to the cause of popular education.”
    —Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)