Oracle Database Discussions

Background: I'm at a small community college and learning some Oracle with 10g set up for the moment on my computer at home. The CS department has limited funds and is currently, as I understand it, running MySQL for its databases, largely on the assumption that it would be prohibitively expensive to set up Oracle (the college itself is running Oracle, I'm told, but I assume that there's no way they'd be willing to give students any access at all to that system).

I was wondering if it wouldn't be possible (ideally for free) to set up an Oracle database on the CS department's server just to work with it for learning purposes--i.e., with no "real" data (examples: a cattle database that I developed in Access and have partially transferred over to Oracle 10g at home, or the guy who does the servers for the CS department likely has some old and unprivileged data from MySQL that we could transfer over to Oracle for experimentation). It seems to me like a hugely important part of learning to work with Oracle is learning how to manage multiple users with diverse access privileges and all that kind of stuff. Also, actually seeing how Oracle works when set up the way it's intended to be, and what's involved in tweaking it to run optimally, etc.

If it's possible to do something like that, I'd like to talk with the relevant people and try to get an Oracle learning setup going, but cost is the first obvious issue. I figured you guys would know how that works and if anything might be possible in that regard.