Online courses directory (217)

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 />

This is an intensive 6-week course where students will learn effective skills and techniques for writing effective web content that will hold the reader's attention. This course will cover everything from understanding how visitors read a web page and writing techniques to measuring the results of your improved writing. This course is ideal for students beginning to dabble in the art of online writing to the more advanced web writer looking to polish their skills.

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.

Writing History is a survey of historical thought, philosophy, and historiography. This course will survey the questions, methods, and debates historians have engaged in over the years and around the world. The course will also address best practices to researching and writing history.

Rhetorical Composing engages you in a series of interactive reading, research, and composing activities along with assignments designed to help you become more effective consumers and producers of alphabetic, visual and multimodal texts. Join us to become more effective writers... and better citizens.

How can scientists become better writers? Topics include principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, and issues in publication and peer review.

How can scientists become better writers? Topics include principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, and issues in publication and peer review.

This course provides the opportunity for students-as readers, viewers, writers and speakers-to engage with social and ethical issues they care deeply about. Over the course of the semester, through discussing the writing of classic and contemporary authors, we will explore different perspectives on a range of social issues such as free speech, poverty and homelessness, mental illness, capital punishment and racial and gender inequality. In addition, we will analyze selected documentary and feature films and photographs that represent or dramatize social problems or issues. In assigned essays, students will have the opportunity to write about social and ethical issues of their own choice. This course aims to help students to grow significantly in their ability to understand and grapple with arguments, to integrate secondary print and visual sources and to craft well-reasoned and elegant essays. Students will also keep a reading journal and give oral presentations. In class we will discuss assigned texts, explore strategies for successful academic writing, freewrite and respond to one another's essays.

Intended for English language teachers and students, world language teachers and students, and everyone else wishing to understand the structure of English, this course explains English holistically by describing the fixed order of the sentence and the interrelationship of its parts. This course is not a series of independent lessons, but a deeper, more focused, unified look into the structure of English. Participants quickly discover that all English sentences follow the same principles by identifying the places contained in every sentence and the types of relationships and phrases found in those places. From day one, participants describe English sentences in a simple, straightforward manner and are able to apply this information for editing purposes. These skills facilitate the teaching and learning of other languages as well. Course content is taken from linguistics and adapted to language teaching and learning. Course content is cumulative, applies directly to every sentence, and becomes the method for describing how words and phrases are combined into sentences to create meaning. X-words (traditionally called auxiliary verbs or helping verbs) are our keys for unlocking and revealing the hidden structure of every sentence. Class content is provided through the X-Word Grammar online video series available at the X-Word Grammar Store. Subscription cost is $15. The philosophy of X-Word Grammar: The simple sentence is a unique approach and quite different than any other grammar you have ever studied. It is logical, useful, and interesting! If you want to learn about the structure of the English sentence, this class is for you. Try it. You will like it!