Oxford University has joined forces with its American counterparts to offer courses on the web to their 500,000 students.
The USA's Princeton, Stanford and Yale have become partners with Oxford to provide distance learning courses on the Internet.
Each university is to pump more than 2m into the non-profit making University for Life-Long Learning.
The alliance will provide interactive seminars, multi-media programmes, topical web sites with links to research information and live and taped coverage of campus speakers, exhibitions and other events and lectures on tape. The courses will be about six weeks long, and will not be part of degrees or other qualifications.
Jonathan Darby, director of technology-assisted life-long learning at the University's continuing education department said: "The idea is that we continue to meet the interests of our full-time students after they have left the University."
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