At 6 a.m. Seattle time, with a french-pressed coffee in hand, I recently took a taster lecture from London’s New College of the Humanities via Zoom.

The whole experience lasted less than an hour, and involved the following:

  • An introduction to the graduate programs at NCH.
  • A review of NCH’s affiliation with Northeastern University and some of its more innovative dual graduate degree initiatives.
  • A detailed lecture by a professor on a machine learning project for color recognition.
  • Some information on UK visa requirements for students

I asked two questions during the event: one about the tradeoffs between pre-admission studying Python vs. Philosophy, one about student visa implications for my wife as a dependent. Both questions were answered promptly.

All of this was free, accessed with a click of a button.

It’s important to back off and consider how amazing all of this is: with a simple internet connection (an infrastructure privilege, to be sure), the ease of the transfer of information, supplemented with direct engagement, is phenomenal.