Friday, April 25, 2008

A Yale Course for Free

Thought you might like to know that Yale University is offering some of its courses online - for free! Among the modules on offer is a course in Modern Poetry taught by Professor Langdon Hammer (left) which covers :
... the body of modern poetry, its characteristic techniques, concerns, and major practitioners. The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance. Diverse methods of literary criticism are employed, such as historical, biographical, and gender criticism.
The lecturers are on video and archived so you can progress through them at your own pace. (Initially the lectures went out live, twice a week.) Much of the course material is downloadable and you can buy the recommended text, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1, Modern Poetry second-hand at Abebooks.com.

Update :

Chet alerted me to MIT's courses online. I like the sound of the ones on reading and writing the short story, and on writing and reading the poem.

Heaven's ... now I start looking there's even more out there! About.com lists some free writing and journalism courses, among them Steve Barnes Lifewriting class which he teaches at UCLA.

Then there's F2K, Bob Hembree's free fiction writing course which is offered 6 times a year.

Any more free literature or writing classes that anyone knows about?

Update 2:

Chet found another amazing source of free courses - the UK Open University's Learning Space. Among the courses on offer What is Poetry?, Start Writing Fiction, Approaching Poetry, Approaching Prose Fiction.

15 comments:

Lydia Teh said...

Sharon, thanks for the link (the first one is faulty). I've always wanted to study Psychology, now I get to do it for free and at my own pace too. Super.

bibliobibuli said...

link fixed, thanks lydia. i think it would be nice to study some of the subjects i know absolutely nothing about - philosophy and astrophysics ...

Anonymous said...

I took a course in political philosophy once, but it was a while ago.

Anyway, long drive home + MP3 player + these courses = oh yeah baby.

Chet said...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has something similar, called MIT OpenCourseWare. About 1,800 courses in all, in Architecture and Planning, Engineering, Health Sciences and Tiarodjechnology, etc. Writing and Humanistic Studies, too, under Humanities, Arts and Social Science.

Elizabeth said...

Langdon Hammer is awesome!

They are videotaping Contemporary American Lit this semester, which is pretty good, so watch out for that.

bibliobibuli said...

elizabeth - he's your lecturer in "real life"? if so am envious. please give me a nudge when the contemporary american lit is up if i miss it.

dreameridiot said...

wonderful.... Thanks for the info.

Anonymous said...

Good for them. At least they're not charging thousands for it :)

Chet said...

There's also the Get Writing mini courses at the BBC site.

ikanbilis said...

hallelujah for all these freebies, especially for a not-yet-in-college kid like me.

international relations and world history are my favorites!

Little Miss Curious said...

Thanks for the links, Sharon. They are very useful. I'm a student with the Open University in the UK but they have not gone as far to offer lecture videos like Yale University.

bibliobibuli said...

yes, i checked the OU site too and was disappointed - how hard would it be to do it? when i was living in UK i enjoyed watching the OU's TV programmes on the BBC.

Chet said...

There's a site called OpenLearn, and its tagline is "Study online with the Open University for free".

bibliobibuli said...

brilliant, chet! linked it in the main post.

msiagirl said...

These are wonderful Sharon and Chet, thank you, thank you for putting the links on here. Isn't Langdon Hammer amazing to watch! I'm jealous of Elizabeth too. Will be looking out for contem am lit too - wheee!