The best way to spend the summer? Studying St Augustine
Or medieval magic, Mesopotamian demons or K-pop — the online courses opening up a whole world of art, history, philosophy and, yes, teen idols
It begins with a late-night Google search in January. I am looking for the author of a quote — “our heart is restless until it rests in you” — which is attributed to a “church father” in an article I’ve just read about why we binge-watch TV shows. My dive down this internet rabbit hole eventually leads me to a University of Oxford course on St Augustine, the fifth-century North African bishop who shaped western thinking for a thousand years and beyond. The price is £360; there are no entry requirements, and the expected study time is 10 hours a week. On a whim, I sign up.
What follows is transformational. Over the next two and a half months, Susan Griffith, a member of the Department of Theology and Religion, leads a group of 20 students ranging from a 91-year-old retired teacher in Canada to pastors in the US and undergraduates from various countries (the course comes with transferable credits if you complete the written assignments) through the various stages of Augustine’s life, work and intellectual trajectory.
The weekly video discussions are lively. Early on, one student proposes that Augustine was “clearly gay” because of his outpouring of grief at the death of a male friend in his autobiographical masterpiece Confessions. Griffith explains why this is unlikely, warns of the dangers of reading historical texts with a contemporary mindset, and encourages us to say anything in her class anyway; there are no stupid ideas here (in fact, there are several stupid ideas expressed here, mostly by me).
But as I spend the long winter evenings reading the words of a man who lived 16 centuries ago, it’s as though I’m being slowly unhooked from the matrix — the stultifying Instagram scrolling, the mindless Netflix streaming — and taught how to focus again. And it’s exhilarating.
Seven months on and I am now fully addicted to online learning. Though I’ve been an avid reader for much of my life, in recent years I’ve been distracted by the pressures of work and the grind of responsibilities, and have struggled to finish anything other than trashy novels or audiobooks. Now, I’m making up for lost time.
As I write this, I am one week away from completing a class on Josephus’s The Jewish War, an astounding eyewitness account of the Roman suppression of revolt in Judaea and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70AD, taught by Zoë Eisenman at the University of Chicago’s Graham School, its standalone institute for adult education ($350). I am taking two courses at Stanford University, one on “Demystifying AI” ($470), the other on K-pop ($365) — why not? — and I am slowly working my way through a lecture series and reading list on medieval history at Yale (available on YouTube for free) and another on the possibility of alien life taught by David Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist who is professor emeritus at Princeton. This is also available for free, on Coursera, a subscription platform for online classes which has 205mn registered users, according to its first quarter financial results for 2026.
There is no hard data on the number of short courses offered by universities in Britain and the US, nor on the number of students taking them, but the University of Oxford reports a “significant growth in demand” since the pandemic, according to a spokesperson. In the academic year 2024-25, its Lifelong Learning division taught more than 15,000 students from 140 countries on more than 700 short courses — both online and in person — ranging from classes in medieval magic, Renaissance art and Tudor history to urban planning, artificial intelligence and psychological disorders, among myriad others in every discipline.
The overall supply of such teaching from the sector “has definitely increased in the 10-plus years that I’ve been working in higher education”, says Neil Mosley, a consultant specialising in online courses. “Institutions are taking a range of approaches: some want to maximise numbers and therefore focus on subjects with traditionally high enrolment such as business, management, law and, most recently, artificial intelligence, while others use this programming as a way of fulfilling their mandates of offering education to everyone.”
The Courtauld Institute in London, the prestigious art history college that is part of the University of London, sees itself in the latter camp. Next year, it is launching its own open university programme, which will help fulfil the vision of its industrialist founder, says the initiative’s director Jane Fletcher. “Nearly 100 years ago, Samuel Courtauld talked about art for all, and our open university programming can truly be the embodiment of that. We’re breaking down the barriers to entry for people, both geographically and financially.”
It’s not just universities offering online teaching for the general public. In June, I joined the British Museum’s first such course, on the subject of Mesopotamian art (£95), which you need a museum membership to sign up for. Five curators take it in turns to present video classes on their respective areas of expertise, including cuneiform tablets, excavations in Iraq and magic, divination and medicine. I can now write 10 words in cuneiform and tell you why the director of The Exorcist got the plot point about an ancient Mesopotamian demon called Pazuzu possessing the film’s protagonist, Regan, badly wrong (spoiler alert: Pazuzu is on our side, it’s Lamashtu we need to worry about).
“We have so many leading specialists under one roof here and this is a really nice way of sharing their expertise with our members around the world,” says Celine Nonde, senior supporter engagement manager, who adds that there will be more curator-led courses for British Museum members over the coming year.
Next, I attend a set of three online classes on Zurbarán and 17th-century Spanish painting hosted by the National Gallery (£45) to tie in with its current exhibition on the artist — I pass the quiz asking us to distinguish works by Zurbarán, Velázquez and Murillo with flying colours — and then move on to a surprisingly engaging, pre-recorded series of nine short lectures on English embroidery available on the V&A website (£45). Presented by Jennifer Wearden, formerly the museum’s senior curator of textiles, these are worth the price for the first talk alone, a timely examination of the Bayeux Tapestry — not actually a tapestry at all, but the most famous embroidery of all time — which is soon going on display at the British Museum.
While I enjoy all these museum lectures, for teaching that stays with you there’s no substitute for interactive discussions with fellow students led by university specialists. If you know you’re going to have to contribute to a conversation about St Augustine’s City of God, for example, you’re going to do the required reading and try hard to formulate interesting thoughts about it.
The popularity of such courses — the counterpoint to grim headlines about falling literacy rates and declining attention spans — should encourage us all. There’s a whole universe of art and history, theology and philosophy, psychiatry, science, technology and, yes, even K-pop out there, and it’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a curious mind. So ditch the Netflix subscription and let’s get started.