5 easy ways to enrich your learning this summer

Context The summer can be a great opportunity to really engage with your academic and intellectual interests. What follow are five suggestions of how you can do this armed with no more than a smartphone and an Internet connection.

Take an online course MOOCs are massive, open, online courses. They use the power of the Internet to link universities to interested public audiences. Futurelearn is the largest UK provider of MOOCs, offering dozens of courses at a time for a range of UK and world universities. Others, like Coursera, are much bigger but less accessible and of inconsistent quality. Once you sign up, you can access the courses whenever you want.

Visit a museum Some of the world’s largest museum collections are now online. How about a trip to the British Museum without leaving Heckmondwike? Some online exhibitions use advanced photography to allow you to handle exhibits virtually. Google Arts and Culture displays thousands of works of art, some of which are shot with gigapixel cameras, allowing you to study and admire them in ultra-fine detail.

Listen in on leading academics On iTunesU, some universities make recorded lecture series free to download. Use iTunes to find a full selection. In Our Time is a long-running Radio 4 programme, in which 3 or 4 academics discuss a given topic for 45 minutes. The range of topics covered is enormous; there will be something for everyone.

Tackle challenging problems beyond the curriculum HE+ is set up and run by the University of Cambridge to bridge the gap between A-levels and university study. It offers a series of problems and activities on subject levels. It is not just for those thinking of applying to Oxbridge.

Read a classic book Copyright on books lasts a maximum of 75 years, meaning everything published from the early 20th century or earlier is freely available. Before mass, fast-speed Internet access, this didn’t mean much in practice. But with the advent of e-books, sites like Project Gutenburg put tens of thousands of these works at your fingertips.

A note on personal statements The best reason for trying any of these things is simply because you want to. Learning is an end in itself. If you are looking ahead to UCAS personal statements, however, it is always better to reflect deeply and meaningfully on one or two things than simply list lots of ‘wider reading’ with no reflection or development.