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)
“It is well known, that the best productions of the best human intellects, are generally regarded by those intellects as mere immature freshman exercises, wholly worthless in themselves, except as initiatives for entering the great University of God after death.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The African race evidently are made to excel in that department which lies between the sensuousness and the intellectual—what we call the elegant arts. These require rich and abundant animal nature, such as they possess; and if ever they become highly civilised, they will excel in music, dancing and elocution.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn’t prevent the vessel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C)
“Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)