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As governments struggle to fund traditional university places — and this weekend 170,000 UK students starting a new university year are still waiting for loans to come through — is the internet ready to open up the cloisters of academe?

At the very least, it is reinvigorating the idea of life-long learning. If you have ever wondered who Euripedes was or where you might find a quark, you can now find a suitable lecture to listen to on your way to the office or sitting at home in front of your PC.

This time last year Marianne Talbot was embarking on a standard series of lectures on philosophy at Oxford University. Her words are still echoing around the world.

“It was a perfectly ordinary lecture I gave to an audience, but the university asked me if I’d mind if they recorded it and made a podcast,” said Talbot last week. “The next thing I knew it had hit No 1.”

Her talk, “A romp through the history of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present day”, had topped the list of most-downloaded items on iTunes U.

“I got congratulatory e-mails from the techie people and I was tickled pink. I started thinking: how many \ is that? Presumably more than 20, but is it 100?”

Talbot, director of studies in philosophy at the department for continuing education at Oxford, had no idea how far her lecture was spreading. “Apparently the number of downloads is 5,000 a week,” she said.

“It’s extraordinary. It’s difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that throughout the world 5,000 people are downloading my lecture every week.”

Talbot admits she was fortunate to choose an engaging title in a subject of wide appeal. Nevertheless, she describes the potential of such open access as “awesome”.

The government, she notes, is no longer going to subsidise educational courses for people who already have qualifications (unless they are aiming for a higher qualification than they already have). So if you have one ordinary degree, you will get no financial help taking a second one. Such restrictions may well promote the use of open educational resources (OER), as iTunes U and its like are known.

At Cambridge, Nicky Clayton, professor of comparative cognition in the experimental psychology department, has also been surprised by the power of the internet. She was chosen to make a short film about her work as part of Cambridge’s 800th anniversary celebrations.

“The main message they wanted to get across is that although Cambridge is 800 years old and steeped in beautiful tradition, it’s not all old hat and cobwebs,” she said. So she decided to combine her research into animal behaviour with her passion for dance.

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