Hosted by / Sponsored by: The Open University

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: Aimed at the more advanced writer, this free online course is designed to show you the importance of grammar in your writing, utilizing the already sound knowledge of grammar that learners are expected to bring with them to the course.

Looking at everything from the power of grammar to how its meaning has changed through history and from the contextual variation of grammar to exploring topics such as ellipsis and dysfluency, this 15 hour course is divided up into easy to digest subjects and is a very interesting course for anyone looking to further their writing skills.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: UC Berkeley

Course of Study: Philosophy

Course Link: Take this course

Description: This course is a seminar style podcast from Berkeley College, which attempts to explicate Division II of Martin Heidegger’s seminal philosophical book, Being and Time. His work is widely considered one of the most influential of the 20^th century, for departing from traditional Western abstract assumptions about the meaning of Being. Heidegger redefines Being within the context of time and emphasizes the authentic existence of Being in the world. The course is an in-depth philosophical challenge for interpreting the many concepts and possible meanings around Heidegger’s ideas on Being.

Lecture Topics:

Guilt and Resoluteness

Being-towards-Death

Anticipatory Resoluteness

Temporality and Historicity

Authentic Temporality, the Phenomenon

Temporality of Being-in-the-World

The Ordinary Conception of Time

Genesis of the Ordinary Conception of Time

Temporalitat, Basic Problems

Ontological Difference, Basic Problems

Hosted by / Sponsored by: UC Berkeley

Course of Study: Media Studies

Course Link: Take this course

Description: Watch and listen to over 25 webcast lectures from University of Berkeley, which explore New Media in American Cyber-Culture. Integral to the course is how different ethnicities access information and the impact on people’s pursuit of happiness and sense of success.

The course theorizes changes in media over the past 500 years, from early print to current technologies. Many issues are examined in relation to the  modern speed of producing information, how it is accessed, utilized and made available. Some topics include networking, GPS, social media, copyrighting and much more.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: A course that was first taught to MIT students in Spring 2005, it has been made available for anyone to take completely free of charge, with the aim being to act as an introduction for those wanting to start writing for the stage.

Delivered by Laura Harrington, this free online course is divided into a dozen individual topics, from first understanding what exactly a play is and how it is defined through to the importance of actions as well as words and finishing with analyzing other amateur plays.

With each session expected to last around 3 hours, this course isn’t a quick one but it is particularly in depth and should provide any beginner to playwriting with a fantastic insight into this type of writing.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: Purdue OWL

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: Of all of the different types of punctuation to get your head around as a writer, commas are widely regarded as being the one that can cause the most problems.

This free online course by Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) aims to provide a full and in-depth explanation of when a comma should be used, how it should be used and most importantly, why it should be used.

Offered through a PowerPoint presentation, once you have completed this course you should have a full understanding of comma usage and when and where a comma should be used to help you produce writing of a higher standard.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT OpenCourseWare

Course of Study: Arts and Humanities

Course Link: Take this course

The undergraduate course combines musical samplings and textbook readings,  beginning with a prelude from 1900-1960 and tracing multiple movements from 1960—the point of shift in 20^th century Western musical history. Post-60s music reflects the convergence of constantly changing cultural and technical influences. The stricter experimentation earlier in the century with mathematical serialism, atonal forms and indeterminate jazz  now emerges to an eclectic mix of post serial, neotonal, minimalist, new age and globalized Western traditional movements. Classical, rock, jazz, electronic, multicultural music and all their hybrids are explored. An assignment guideline is provided for independent analysis of live performances.

Several readings from this Spring 2006 MIT course are recommended, along with two required textbooks:

Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945 by Paul Griffiths

Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and 5 Generations of American Experimental Composers by William Duckworth

Unit Topics:
Prelude: 1900-1960
Unit One: Order and Entropy
Unit Two: Mavericks
Unit Three: New Sounds, New Technologies
Unit Four: Quotation and Polystyle
Unit Five: The Minimalist Impulse
Unit Six: The Persistence of Tonality
Unit Seven: Agora

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: Produced and delivered by Professor Karen Boiko, the primary aim of this course is to provide all learners with a full and practical understanding of both what their purpose as a writer is, as well as who they are writing for.

The course is intended to be delivered over 25 individual sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours and covering everything from small group work to video observations and essay workshops to free writing.

Aimed at those at an undergraduate level, this free online writing course should prove to be a fantastic aid when looking for your true creativity as a writer.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: MIT OpenCourseWare

Course of Study: Arts and Humanities

Course Link: Take this course

Course Description: The theme of this intensive undergraduate/graduate course is literacy and new media. The “myth of literacy” is examined in the many complex contexts of media—from ancient Greek oral and written media to modern interactive technical media. Through theoretical readings and numerous media applications, students question assumptions about language, texts and contradictory definitions of literacy within social systems.

The course directly engages students in a long list of modalities and concepts—including online social networking, fan communities, video gaming, blogging, appropriation and remixing, multitasking, digital photography, animation and podcasting, transmedia navigation, performance, distributed cognition and collective intelligence.

The 25-lecture course includes notes and a comprehensive reading list, including many direct links to resources. Readings include Plato, Goody and Watt, Scribner and Cole, Graff, Brandt, Heath, Lemke, Gee, Alvermann, Jenkins, Hobbs, Pratt, Leander, Dyson, Levy, Kress, and Lankshear and Knobel.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: The Open University

Course of Study: Arts and Humanities

Course Link: Take This Course

Learn and practice online research skills for academic, work-related or personal study of the Arts and History. With exercises and links, this introductory course guides you through the logic of advanced  search strategies for search engines and specialized directories—as you learn to better assess sources and quality of Arts information on websites, databases, electronic journals and podcasts. Examine effective ways for organizing your material, referencing your work and producing bibliographies.

The most recent tools for networking information, such as RSS, blogs and mailing lists are explored. You will also investigate social bookmarking and the possibilities of folksonomy–the Internet open platform method of accessing information based upon user-driven tagging, rather than on predefined, top-down classifications.

Hosted by / Sponsored by: Suite101

Course of Study: Writing / Literature

Course Link: Take This Course

Description: This course, offered by Suite101, has been produced with novice writers in mind and aims to educate them in all aspects of basic writing.   Offering information on everything from nouns and pronouns to apostrophes and punctuation marks, the course takes a full and extensive look at various different necessary pieces of knowledge that are needed for writing.

Divided up into 4 separate lessons, each with several of their own sub-topics, whilst this free online writing course may be aimed at beginner writers, there is without doubt some very useful information for those writers who have a natural writing talent but no major theoretical knowledge.