Online courses directory (147)

Great works of fiction often take us to far-off places; they sometimes conduct us on journeys toward a deeper understanding of what's right next door. We'll read, discuss, and interpret a range of short and short-ish works: The reading list will be chosen from among such texts as "Gilgamesh," Homer's Odyssey (excerpts), Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (excerpts), Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Saleh's Season of Migration to the North, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, John Cheever's "The Swimmer," Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K, Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," Toni Morrison's Jazz, H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Beckett's How It Is, Calvino's Invisible Cities, Forster's A Passage to India. As a CI-H class, this subject will involve substantial practice in argumentative writing and oral communication.

"Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

Together with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Professor Jonathan Bate explores Shakespeare, his works and the world he lived in.

Academics from the Shakespeare Institute introduce aspects of the most famous play ever written - its origins, texts, and history.

Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience and was immensely successful. Shakespeare is also rightly regarded as one of the greatest playwrights the world has known. This course will try to understand both Shakespeare’s popularity and his greatness by starting from a simple premise: that the fullest appreciation of Shakespeare can be achieved only when literary study is combined with analysis of the plays as theatre. Hence, as we delve into the dimensions that make Shakespeare’s plays so extraordinary--from the astonishing power of their language to their uncanny capacity to illuminate so much of human life--we will also explore them in performance from Shakespeare’s own theatre to the modern screen. At the same time, actors will occasionally join our effort and demonstrate ways of bringing the text alive as living theatre. Plays to be studied will include Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, King Lear, and The Winter's Tale.

Image courtesy Castle Rock Entertainment/The Kobal Collection

Before your course starts, try the new edX Demo where you can explore the fun, interactive learning environment and virtual labs. Learn more.

Is there a required textbook?
The texts of all six plays will be required. Free, electronic versions can be found on numerous sites on the internet, including the following, which offers pdf downloads: http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/download.html. However, free, internet editions do not provide glosses or notes that explain difficult words and phrases. We strongly recommend that participants purchase texts (paper or electronic) that provide important aids to reading.

Spanish 277 is the prerequisite course for minors and concentrators in Spanish. This course combines online self-instruction of Spanish grammar with an introduction to literature in Spanish. In-class discussions will focus on literary concepts and will integrate the study of grammar usage in the readings. The online materials include print handouts, PowerPoint presentations, audio mini-lessons, and links to online grammar explanations, all of which will allow students to bring their grammar skills up to the desired level. There are also self-correcting electronic exercises, all of which provide feedback on correct/incorrect answers. Course Level: Undergraduate This Work, Spanish 277 - Reading, Grammar, and Composition, by Dennis Pollard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This hands-on course helps you to get started with your own fiction writing, focusing on the central skill of creating characters.

Inspired by Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous quote, “Do one thing every day that scares you,” Stunt Writing For Personal Experience is a process that uses writing as a tool for you to learn about yourself, and gain skills in communicating your own unique story.

In "The American Novel Since 1945" students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel's form, fiction's engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.

Poetry lives in any reader, not necessarily in performance by the poet or a trained actor. The pleasure of actually saying a poem, or even saying it in your imagination—your mind’s ear—is essential. That is a central idea of “The Art of Poetry,” well demonstrated by the videos at favoritepoem.org: the photographer saying Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick,” the high school student saying Langston Hughes’ “Minstrel Man.” Those readers base what they say about each poem upon their experience of saying it.

The course is demanding, and based on a certain kind of intense reading, requiring prolonged, thorough— in fact, repeated—attention to specific poems.

The focus will be on elements of the art such as poetry’s historical relation to courtship; techniques of sound in free verse; poetry and difficulty; kidding and tribute—with only incidental attention to “schools,” jargons, categories, and coteries.

Learners are encouraged to think truly, carefully and passionately about what the poem says, along with how the poem feels in one’s own, actual or imagined voice. As Robert Pinsky says, in the Preface to Singing School: “this anthology will succeed if it encourages the reader to emulate it by replacing it . . . create your own anthology.” In a comparable way, this course hopes to inspire a lifelong study of poetry.

Learn how to analyze, contextualize and create stories and narratives in current media: from understanding storytelling basics to discussing new online tools and formats, this course brings together a network of media researchers, creators, and students.

What the what? A course about swearing? (No need to put a quarter in the swear jar; it’s totally academic.) An honest-to-goodness linguistics professor will guide you through the study of taboo language, including syntax, semantics, phonology & morphology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, second language acquisition, and cross-linguistic comparison. See? No four-letter words here, so you know it’s for scholars. Enroll today (unless you’re averse to obscenity) and learn everything you always wanted to know about bad words, but were afraid to ask your mother. Required text: This Book is Taboo: An Introduction to Linguistics through Swearing Available for purchase at Kendall Hunt Hard-cover: $54.60 E-book: $43.68 Students who successfully complete this course will receive a certificate of attendance. This course is offered through Instructure as a non-credit course created by the University of Utah. Students enrolled in this course are not considered students of the University of Utah.

This course revolves around the work of revising writing, learning, and engaging with language and community. You will explore who you are as a learner as you write about yourself and your language use, as well as consider who you are as a communicator as you critique texts, persuade audiences, and collaborate with others. We've designed this course to help you revise how you write and to help you collect a toolkit of effective reading, writing, and learning strategies. Each of the four modules integrates academic and social contexts (e.g., Facebook, ELI peer review application) to encourage a wide application of the skills you acquire during the course. The skills you will practice in this course (like narration, summary, etc.) are fairly typical for writing classes at many U.S. universities; however, our course focuses on you as a writer and thinker. Recognizing specific learning and communication practices and considering ways to employ them can make you more successful in future coursework and in all communication.

How do addictions develop? How are they best treated and how are they prevented? This course explores these key questions further.

Lyrics Training is a Web application that allows you to read and listen to the lyrics from music videos and can be used as a fun and interactive way for language teachers and trainers to introduce new vocabulary and grammar to their students in a classroom setting. This free online language learning course will introduce you to the features and functionality of Lyrics Training, you will learn how to choose a song in the language you are learning and listen to the lyrics of the song word by word. Lyrics Training allows students to fill in the lyrics as they go along, and the difficulty level they choose decides how many words in a sentence are missing and they must fill in. This online language learning tool is particularly useful for students of foreign languages who want a fun and entertaining way to learn the correct pronunciation of words and it will improve their listening skills as students must identify words from a song. This free language learning course will be of great interest to all language teachers and trainers who would like to learn more about Web 2.0 applications that can greatly improve the learning experience of their students, and to all learners who would like to learn about using Lyrics Training for a fun way of learning a new language.<br />

MIT students bring rich cultural backgrounds to their college experience. This course explores the splits, costs, confusions, insights, and opportunities of living in two traditions, perhaps without feeling completely at home in either. Course readings include accounts of growing up Asian-American, Hispanic, Native American, and South-East Asian-American, and of mixed race. The texts include selections from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Kesaya E. Noda's "Growing Up Asian in America," Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, Gary Soto's "Like Mexicans," Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, the movies Smoke Signals and Mississippi Masala, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, and others. We will also use students' writings as ways to investigate our multiple identities, exploring the constraints and contributions of cultural and ethnic traditions. Students need not carry two passports in order to enroll; an interest in reading and writing about being shaped by multiple influences suffices.

This course is an examination of the formal structural and textual variety in poetry. Students engage in extensive practice in the making of poems and the analysis of both students' manuscripts and 20th-century poetry. The course attempts to make relevant the traditional elements of poetry and their contemporary alternatives. There are weekly writing assignments, including some exercises in prosody.

This is a course focused on the literary genre of the essay, that wide-ranging, elastic, and currently very popular form that attracts not only nonfiction writers but also fiction writers, poets, scientists, physicians, and others to write in the form, and readers of every stripe to read it. Some say we are living in era in which the essay is enjoying a renaissance; certainly essays, both short and long, are at present easier to get published than are short stories or novels, and essays are featured regularly and prominently in the mainstream press (both magazines and newspapers) and on the New York Times bestseller books list. But the essay has a history, too, a long one, which goes back at least to the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne, generally considered the progenitor of the form. It will be our task, and I hope our pleasure, to investigate the possibilities of the essay together this semester, both by reading and by writing.

This course focuses on the period between roughly 1550-1850. American ideas of race had taken on a certain shape by the middle of the nineteenth century, consolidated by legislation, economics, and the institution of chattel slavery. But both race and identity meant very different things three hundred years earlier, both in their dictionary definitions and in their social consequences. How did people constitute their identities in early America, and how did they speak about these identities? Texts will include travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems, by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American writers.

Explore how writing style, web design and structure can grab the attention of and engage online readers.