cleverhelp:

Massively Open Online Courses are the new vogue way to take control of your education and your career, and it’s the best thing. Higher education should be a right, but many of us can’t afford or can’t even access modern college courses. Anyone with conviction and a few extra hours a week can get themselves a college education from some of the best teachers in the world. You can even put finished courses on your resume. Just a few colleges that offer free online courses: MIT, Boston University, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Tokyo, Harvard, Yale University, and the University of Geneva – and that’s barely scratching the surface.

Those are some of the most funded, most prestigiously staffed universities in the world. The education offered by them, for free, is at your fingers. Just because the world might hold degrees and the brick and mortar institutions of modern universities as a reward for the already privileged or the lucky doesn’t mean you don’t have the resources to learn. Throwing the exposition away, here are my favorite courses for writers available this fall semester:

• English Grammar and Style taught by University of Queensland’s Roslyn Petelin, Gabrielle O’Ryan, and Michael Lefcourt. It’s a basic writing course, taught by professors who understand English like the backs of their hands. 

• The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours: Epic and Lyrictaught by Harvard’s Professor Gregory Nagy. Course on heroic story structure that walks you through the ancient Greek heroes and stories that set up the future of western literature. Breaks down the Epic and Lyric forms.

• The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours: Signs of the Hero in Epic and Iconography Part two of the course above, this time moving to the influence of visual heroic iconography. 

• Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World taught by Professor Eric Rabkin. Genre course that explores the two major fiction forms as a reflection of human society. Covers a lot of pop culture favorites. 

• Unbinding Prometheus taught by Eric Alan Weinstein through Open Learning. The class, starting in November, will explore the meaning of Percy Shelley’s work and the impact the man (who believed writing could free mankind from their shackles) has had on the world he left behind. 

• The Divine Comedy: Dante’s Journey to Freedom taught by many Georgetown professors, including Dante and Derrida: Face to Face author Frank Ambrosio. It looks frankly awesome, talking about the modern reader and Alighieri’s work, and the first sentence of the class description speaks for itself: Students will question for themselves the meaning of human freedom, responsibility and identity by reading and responding to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

• Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative taught by Vanderbilt University’s Jay Clayton. This class is about Lord of the Rings Online. It’s not actively running, but you can access all the materials online. 

• Laura Ingalls Wilder: Exploring Her Work & Writing Life taught by Missouri State’s Pamela Smith Hill, an Ingalls Wilder scholar. Wilder’s Little House series has informed our perceptions of her era in North American history, but there’s more than meets the eye in her stories. Just like Shakespeare, there are more than a few controversies around authorship, and a lot to talk about in this course.

• How Writers Write Fiction taught by University of Iowa’s professor (and author of Things of the Hidden God) Christopher Merrill. The course presents a curated collection of short, intimate talks created by fifty authors of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays that you can’t catch anywhere else. Features weekly writing assignments.

• Poetry: What It Is, and How to Understand It taught by George Washington University’s Margaret Soltan. A class in modern poetry, the whys and hows, and a cultural learning class we’d recommend for anyone trying to broaden their artistic perspective.

EXTRA CREDIT: Important and interesting classes I would recommended.

• Understanding Violence taught by Professors Deb Houry and Pamela Scully.  Covers elements of biology, sociology, and psychology. You’ll study the biological and psychological causes of violence, and how violence is reported and portrayed in the media. Seems like an excellent research course for action writers.

• Social Entrepeneurship taught by Professors Kai Hockerts, Kristjan Jespersen, Ester Barinaga, Anirudh Agrawal, Sudhanshu Rai, and Robert Austin. Doesn’t just talk about how to use social media for your own benefit — the course is meant to break down how to use social media and community engagement for global change. 

• Comic Books and Graphic Novels taught by University of Colorado Boulder’s William Kuskin. Explores the medium at length. Has special class topics on Batman, Neil Gaiman, Pop Culture, Defining Art, and Gender. 

— Audrey Erin Redpath (@audreyredpath)