How our WOW courses work

Find out all you need to know about our WOW courses

What are Weekly Oxford Worldwide courses?

Weekly Oxford Worldwide (WOW) is a programme of live online classes. Courses combine prerecorded lectures and live weekly interactive meetings for a rich and immersive learning experience.

The live classes are presented on the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform. Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings tutors and students together; participants will simply follow a link to join each weekly session.

We will use a University of Oxford-supported virtual learning environment (VLE) called Canvas, which will provide you with access to recorded lectures, online resources and other educational content.

What will you need in order to participate?

You will need:

  • access to a computer or tablet with a webcam and a healthy internet connection. Any typical computer produced within the last three years should be adequate. 
  • Chrome is the recommended web browser for the best experience and full functionality of all the third-party tools integrated into Canvas.

How will it work?

Each course will close for enrolments 7 days prior to the start date to allow us to complete the course set up. We will email you at that time (7 days before the course begins) with further details and instructions on how to gain access to Canvas for the course materials and how to join the live sessions each week.

This guidance will require some action on your part. As always, students will want to check spam and junk folders during this period to ensure that these emails haven’t gone astray.

Your tutor will produce a recorded lecture, or a series of shorter presentations, for you to view each week. The recordings are provided to you by your tutor in preparation for the live sessions – and, of course, you’ll be able to look at the recorded material after the live sessions, too. The lectures will be available for you to view until the end of your course.

Your course tutor will provide additional reading materials, either through posting them on Canvas or by providing links to freely-available external online resources. These will help you to prepare for the interactive sessions which will take place at the scheduled time each week.

The interactive sessions will amount to an hour each week of live contact time. For some courses that hour will be divided into sections with breaks in between.

All students are expected to engage in independent study in between the lectures and teaching sessions and to complete the coursework for assessment.

As with our face-to-face courses, each class will have a maximum of 25 students, except for creative writing, computing and language courses which will have a maximum of 18.

How much time should you expect to spend on your studies?

As well as the two hours of teaching time, you’ll need to set aside up to a further eight hours each week to consolidate your learning, prepare for the following week, follow up with the reading materials and other resources provided by your tutor, and complete your coursework assignments.  

Credit

With the exception of language classes, all WOW courses are credit-bearing – which means that you can earn credit points (CATS points) to count towards a university qualification. You must register for the CATS points at the time of enrolment or prior to the course start date.

Questions?

If you have questions about how WOW courses work, please contact: weeklyclasses@conted.ox.ac.uk

Terms and Conditions

Students enrolling on Weekly Oxford Worldwide courses are covered by Departmental and University policies, procedures, and terms and conditions, set out here:  

As these are online courses, your particular attention is drawn to the IT regulations and the Netiquette guidelines: 

You should note that the materials on this course platform are made available to students for the purpose of private study. Students are not permitted to distribute the material in any way such as placing it online or on social networking sites. The University’s End User Licence Agreement, which you will be required to agree to when first signing into Canvas, states that students may not “copy a lecture, or issue, lend or communicate any copy to another person, or make an adaptation of a lecture unless specifically authorised in writing or permitted under applicable intellectual property laws”. Should students distribute or publish the materials on their course in any way without authorisation, normal student disciplinary procedures will apply.

Students enrolling on the course should note that the email address with which they sign up for the course may be visible to other participants in their live sessions. No student should use the email address of any member of their course to make contact with them outside the live meetings without that member’s written and express consent, nor should they share such contact information with any other person or organization.

By enrolling on a WOW course, you agree to the above terms and conditions.