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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.
Is it the same as Zartman Ko experiment? TODO find the relevant papers.
History of the University of Oxford by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01This book series appears to be the one: global.oup.com/academic/content/series/h/history-of-the-university-of-oxford-huo/. A mere 250 pounds+ each.
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.- youtu.be/uol4V1Wa8B0?t=343 at the University of Bologna, the original system was for students to decide what they would learn, and hire and fire teachers as they decided. This is opposed to the system of the university of Paris, in which teachers make the final decisions. He mentions that this is the system that the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge use: the "congregation". He mentions that Oxbridge are one of the few universities that maintained this structure (as opposed to having funding sources select the final decision makers)
- youtu.be/uol4V1Wa8B0?t=1327 mentions the quadrangle architecture which served as the basis of the Colleges: make a closed square with everything students need: Chapel, Hall to eat, classes and accommodation. This is based of course on monastic cloisters.
College of the University of Oxford by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-01-10 +Created 1970-01-01A 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.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Internal cross file references done right:
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
Figure 6. Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents.Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordateDescendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact