MASSOLIT NOW HAS 500 COURSES!

MASSOLIT hit a very big milestone this week when we added our FIVE HUNDREDTH course on the site.

It honestly doesn’t seem like long ago that we were heading off to meet Michael Gibb to film him talking about Just War Theory. I had persuaded my flat-mate John (a film-maker) to help us out on the day, and the whole thing went … remarkably smoothly. Editing took a couple of months and we had our first course on the site.

Since then, I’ve emailed more than 2,000 academics, travelled about 48,000 miles to every corner of the UK, and have spent around 5,000 hours editing footage to get where we are today. I’m also very good at pub quizzes!

I can’t possibly include all the highlights from the last seven years, so here are just three:

– Any and all filming with John McRae. Not just because John is brilliant, but because it means I get to spend a couple of hours with Cat (John’s dog).

– Filming Nikk Effingham on the Philosophy of Time, simply because it’s so wonderfully unrelated to anything on the specification, and yet you have this utterly brilliant explanation of why something we all take for granted (i.e. that time exists) is actually quite a mind-boggling concept.

– Llewelyn Morgan on the Aeneid. This was the third course we ever filmed, and we (still) didn’t know what we were doing. And yet his set of lectures just completely set the standard for the kind of stuff we wanted on the site.

So much for the first five hundred courses, then, what about the next five hundred? Well, I’ll be able to tell you more about that in a few months, but for now I’ll just say that we already have two-hundred courses booked in for the next nine months, and some of the people we’ve got involved are very, very good.

Chris Tudor
Founder, MASSOLIT