by Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 35)
Things actually have gotten more and more closed, e.g. of stuff getting paywalled with time:
It appears that things got really bad starting in 2017, possibly when WebLearn was introduced. When things migrated to Canvas, they were closed by default, apparently with any mechanism to publish publicly.
Therefore, they managed to make things more closed than when teachers would just upload to good old ox.ac.uk/~name static websites!!
Ciro Santilli has also heard that some people in the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford opposed to moving away from their Moodle instance precisely because the new options did not support open publishing, so kudos to those people. But most teachers likely don't care and just do whatever is the best internally supported default.
Their "open" video material: podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ A somewhat small part is Creative Commons, but most proprietary. Despite the name "podcasts", they do contain video, it is just a relic.
podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open contains actual Creative Commons only it seems.
It does however appear that professors own their lecture notes, so there some hope maybe: governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-xvi-property-contracts-and-trusts#collapse1383636
Video 1.
University of Oxford documentary by the British Council (1941)
Source.
Their status is a mess as of 2020s, with several systems ongoing. Long live the "original" collegiate university!
E-learning system of the University of Oxford. Closed by default to non-students of course. It might not be possible at all to publish things publicly?
WebLearn was closed in 2023 in favour of Canvas.
Has a mixture of open access and closed access. But at least it can have open access unlike the in-house systems such as Canvas where everything is necessarily paywalled!
Sometimes things appear open but don't show any meaningful content if you are not logged in, which is annoying.
But at least it gives a clear public course list, thing that certain departments (cough Department of Physics of the University of Oxford cough).
The organization is a bit crap, when you expand e.g. C Michaelmas term it shows nothing, just a search.
The way to go is via the year year categories e.g. "Year 2022-23": courses.maths.ox.ac.uk/course/index.php?categoryid=734. Term splitting is annoying, but one can stand it.
There seems to be no way to list all versions of a single course across multiple years besides just doing a search e.g.
This is apparently where past exam papers can be found. Paywalled of course.
The paywall is stupid however, as they seem to provide past papers upon request, e.g.
This adds to the mess of having a different location for material per department. Presumably this exists because the central university authority wants to centralize examinations to have better control over degree requirements. If only they would also do the same for all materials and end the mess.

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It is said that you leave Oxford with either
University of Cambridge students, CanTabBridgeans.
E.g.: thecollegestore.co.uk/products/ladies-oxford-college-puffer-jacket?variant=40590030864549 Black with 5 rows, on left chest "colege name", logo, "Oxford", and right chest optional initials (or sometimes other identifiers/nicknames) to help distinguish from all the other people's identical clothes.
This has a whitelabel version: www.workweargiant.co.uk/product/result-urban-holkham-down-feel-jacket/, the name appears to be "Holkham Down Feel Jacket".
Circa 2020, these are likely given out by each college for free, and are widely used.
If you look 20 and wear one of those, it's almost an ID, you can get anywhere that does not require a key card, porters won't look at you twice!
TODO confirm URL: oxfordgossip.co.uk ? An archive from 2005 when it was hottest: web.archive.org/web/20051204033916/http://www.oxfordgossip.co.uk/new/
TODO spiciest posts ever?
Student science magazine.
Each term has 8 weeks, and the week number is often used to denote the time at which something happens.
Week 0 is also often used to denote the week before classes officially start. This is especially important in the first term of the year (Michaelmas term) where people are coming back to school and meeting old and new friends.
At the end of the year, after Trinity term, students have exams. These basically account for all of the grades. In certain courses such as the Physics course of the University of Oxford, there is only new material on Michaelmas term and Hilary term, Trinity term being revision-only. So you can imagine that during Trinity term, students are going to be on edge.
Bibliography:
Like the U.S.' fall term.
Like the U.S.' spring term.
Like the U.S.' summer term.
E-learning system prior to Canvas: weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal. Appears fully custom and closed source?
Closed in 2023 in favour of Canvas.
As of 2022:
The median household income at the time was 31k[ref]. Clearly, putting one child through university with that income would be basically impossible, you would pay 19 - 5 = 14k/year, almost half of your income. Two children would be impossible. Remember how each family needs to have two children minimum to perpetuate life?
Video 1.
History of Oxford University by Chris Day (2018)
Source. A large part of the video talks about how the insane system of colleges of the University of Oxford came about organically.
A good explanation of how this insane system came up is given at Video "History of Oxford University by Chris Day (2018)".
As if it weren't enough, there are also the 6 Halls: permanent private hall.
The colleges are controlled by its fellows, a small self-electing body of highly successful scholars, usually in the dozens per college number it seems. Each college also usually has different types of fellows, e.g. see he university college page: www.univ.ox.ac.uk/about/college-fellowships/ (archive)
The college system does has its merits though, as it instates a certain sense of Hogwarts "belonging" to a certain group, so it might help students get better support for their learning projects from older students, or through the tutoring system. Of course, all such "belonging" feelings are bad, the correct thing would be to make great online tutorials for all, and answer questions in the open. But oh well, humans are dumb.
The college you are in impacts the quality of your courses, because tutorials are per-college. As of 2023, Ciro Santilli spoke to some students of the Computer science course of the University of Oxford, and was told that in some cases where you don't have anyone who can give the tutorial, you instead get a "class", i.e. a P.h.D. student going through question sheets with no interaction in the C.S. department, rather than a deep interactive discussion over the college fire. How can this system be so broken, it is beyond belief
This functionality is somewhat related to fraternities and sororities in 2000's United States.
Similar to a college, but led by religious denomination leaders rather than fellows.
For students (who are paying for the university to start with...), they will not claim tutorials linked to courses. But a tutorial that shows university laboratories, it is unclear: www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/intellectual-property (archive) This likely includes graduate students, who are also not paid by the university.
For faculty, the university owns everything it seems, to be confirmed.
The course outline is given in a "handbook", a one or more PDF files that contain what people will learn and other practicalities. There is a full list of handbooks at: www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/undergraduate/handbooks, but many of them are closed. The system is so closed that even the fucking course list is closed, e.g. all links at: www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/students/undergraduates are closed. Insane.
www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/undergraduate/handbooks in theory links to all handbooks, but some are likely paywalled. But Google can generally find them anyways.
Course lists: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ True to form, courses appear to have identifiers, e.g. qi for the Quantum Information course of the University of Oxford rather than more arbitrary A1/A2/A3, B1/B2/B3, naming convention used by the Mathematics course of the University of Oxford and the Physics course of the University of Oxford, and URLs can either have years or not:
The "course materials" section of each course leads to courses.cs.ox.ac.uk/ which is paywalled by IP (accessible via Eduroam): TODO which system does it use? Some courses place their materials directly on "www.cs.ox.ac.uk", and when that is the case they are publicly accessible. So it is very much hit and miss. E.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/quantum/index.html from Quantum Processes and Computation course of the University of Oxford has the assignments such as www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/courses/qpc2022/assignment1.pdf publicly visible, but e.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/modelsofcomputation/ has nothing.
Handbook:
A mixed cross department course with the philosophy department. Its corresponding masters is known as Oxford MCompSciPhil. The handbook is together with the computer science one: Section "Computer science course of the University of Oxford".
A mixed cross department course with the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford.. Its corresponding masters is known as Oxford MMathCompSci. The handbook is together with the computer science one: Section "Computer science course of the University of Oxford".
Video 1.
Mathematics and Computer Science at Oxford University by University of Oxford (2017)
Source.
2023: Jonathan Barrett
This section is about the version of the course offerece on Hilary term 2023 (January).
It is the norm induced by the complex dot product over :
(1)
2022 lecturer: Aleks Kissinger
The course would be better named ZX-calculus as it appears to be the only subject covered.
2022 page: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/qsoft/ Half of the problems are Jupyter Notebooks, not bad.
The Oxford mathematics Moodle has detailed course listings, and most PDFs are not paywalled.
E.g. the 2024 course:
Lecturer: Luc Nguyen
Video 1.
Mathematics and Statistics at Oxford University by University of Oxford (2017)
Source.

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From the 2020/2021 Oxford physics course handbooks we can determine the following structure:
Trinity term, the third and final term of each year, contains mostly revision from the previous two terms, after which students take their final exams, which basically account for their entire grade. Trinity is therefore a very tense part of the year for the students. After that they have summer holidays, until coming back for the next year of madness.
The official external course landing page: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing/physics. 2021 archive: web.archive.org/web/20221208212856/https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing/physics) In those pages we see the rough structure, except that it does not have the course codes "A1" etc., and some courses are missing.
At web.archive.org/web/20221229021312/https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2011-06-03/course_v3_pdf_80151.pdf page 11 we can see the global course structure giving the two options, 3 year BA or 4 year Oxford physics masters:
Year 1
(Prelims)
|
|
v
Year 2
(Part A)
|
+-----------+
|           |
v           v
Year 3 BA   Year 3 (MPhys)
(Part B)    (Part B)
|           |
|           |
v           v
BA          Year 4
            (Part C)
            |
            |
            v
            MPhys
Practical courses notes: www-teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk/
The normal navigation to them was paywalled, but the static files are served without login checks if you know their URL. One way to go about it is to search by prefix on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/*/https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/contentblock/2011/06/03/*
The last handbooks we can find are 2020/2021, they might have move to a new more properly paywalled location after that year.
Group of students that represent students academic views about the courses.
users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~lvovsky/B3/ contain assorted PDFs from between 2015 and 2019
Syllabus reads:
Professor in 2000s seems to be
But as of 2023 marked emeritus, so who took over?
Ewart is actually religious:
This dude is pure trouble for Oxford!
2015 professor: Alan J. Barr.
Possible 2022 professor: Guy Wilkinson (unconfirmed): www.chch.ox.ac.uk/staff/professor-guy-wilkinson
users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0014/B6-lectures.html gives a syllabus:
Problem set dated 2015: users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0014/B6-materials/B6_Problems.pdf Marked by: A. Ardavan and T. Hesjedal. Some more stuff under: users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0014/B6-materials/
The book is the fully commercial The Oxford Solid State Basics.
Students choose only one of the Cx courses.
Then there are PhDs corresponding to each of them: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/mpls/physics
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