English OER: OER Courses

Developed and taught by Wyn Kelley of MIT. This course studies the national literature of the United States since the early 19th century. It considers a range of texts - including, novels, essays, and poetry - and their efforts to define the notion of American identity. Readings usually include works by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison.

Designed by Lumen Learning, the course offers a number of themes with links to text, articles, and videos relating to each section.

This course is a chronological survey of American Literature from before the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. The Word documents include a syllabus and course outline, discussion questions, homework assignments, overviews of movements, reading quizzes, exams, and essay assignments.

This course considers some of the substantial early twentieth-century poetic voices in America. Authors vary, but may include Moore, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. We'll read the major poems by the most important poets in English in the 20th century, emphazinig especially the period between post-WWI disillusionment and early WW II internationalism (ca. 1918-1940).

Developed and taught at MIT by Professor Sarah Brouillette. Central to our era is the gradual movement of all the world's regions toward a uniform standard of economic and political development. In this class we will read a variety of recent narratives that partake of, dissent from, or contribute to this story, ranging from novels and poems to World Bank and IMF statements and National Geographic reports. We will seek to understand the many motives and voices – sometimes congruent, sometimes clashing – that are currently engaged in producing accounts of people in the developing world: their hardships, laughter, and courage, and how they help themselves and are helped by outsiders who may or may not have philanthropic motives.

Developed and taught by Professor Sarah Brouillette of MIT. Alienation, overcrowding, sensory overload, homelessness, criminality, violence, loneliness, sprawl, blight. How have the realities of city living influenced literature's formal and thematic techniques? How useful is it to think of literature as its own kind of "map" of urban space? Are cities too grand, heterogeneous, and shifting to be captured by writers? In this seminar we will seek answers to these questions in key city literature, and in theoretical works that endeavor to understand the culture of cities.

Developed and taught by Professor Mary Fuller, MIT; The Renaissance has justly become both famous and notorious as an age of discovery, and its voyages took place in many realms. This semester, we will read several history making narratives of early modern travel: first-hand accounts of discovery, captivity, conquest, or cultural encounter. As Europeans came to acquire experience of unfamiliar places, literary texts of the period began to assimilate this experience by describing imagined voyages across real or fantastic landscapes. Finally, voyages of exploration served Renaissance writers as a metaphor: for intellectual inquiry, for spiritual development, or for the pursuit of love.

This collection contains the California Open Educational Resources Council (CA OER) list of peer-reviewed textbooks for Argumentative Writing and Critical Thinking (common course-id ENGL 105), a top 50 college course identified for inclusion in the California Open Online Library for Education (COOLforEd).

This collection includes web sites that are appropriate for someone teaching developmental writing.

Links for assignments, video, and presentations.
Course:
I plan to focus on material that extends the students' capibilities for learning how to use MS Office, Adobe, and other related tools.

This course applies the principles of ethical and effective communication to the creation of letters, memos, emails, and written and oral reports for a variety of business situations. The course emphasizes planning, organizing, composing, and revising business documents using word processing software for written documents and presentation-graphics software to create and deliver professional-level oral reports. This course is designed for students who already have college-level writing skills.

Intensive study of and practice in the strategies and techniques for developing research-based expository and persuasive texts. Emphasis on effective and ethical rhetorical inquiry, including primary and secondary research methods; critical reading of verbal, visual, and multimedia texts; systematic evaluation, synthesis, and documentation of information sources; and critical thinking about evidence and conclusions.

Basic skills in academic writing for beginning and developing undergraduates.

Over 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare remains the central author of the English-speaking world; he is the most quoted poet and the most regularly produced playwright — and now among the most popular screenwriters as well. Why is that, and who "is" he? Why do so many people think his writing is so great? What meanings did his plays have in his own time, and how do we read, speak, or listen to his words now? What should we watch for when viewing his plays in performance? Whose plays are we watching, anyway? We'll consider these questions as we carefully examine a sampling of Shakespeare's plays from a variety of critical perspectives.

The course covers British literature and culture during Queen Victoria's long reign, 1837-1901. This was the brilliant age of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson – and many others. It was also the age of urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwin, religious crisis, imperial expansion, information explosion, bureaucratization – and much more.

Great epics, plays, poetry, and other literary texts have made their way around the world through time and translation, and are still captivating audiences today. This multimedia resource invites viewers to appreciate and – most importantly – read these ancient and modern works. The 13 texts are introduced on video by a wide-ranging cast including scholars, translators, artists, and writers. Excerpts of the texts are found on an extensive Web site along with background material and reading support; an interactive timeline and a feature on translation; and resources for teaching and further study.