I’ve only recently heard about a new Shakespeare MOOC that has just started so you still have time to sign up if you want to join in. As with all MOOCs the course is free. It’s called Shakespeare in Community, and is sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Madison. All the Shakespeare MOOCs I’ve done so far have been Futurelearn, a UK platform, and this one is the first I’ve encountered on the international Coursera platform. Four plays are being discussed over the four weeks of the course: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest. It runs from 23 April to 22 May.
As well as helping participants to learn about the plays themselves, the course will look at the whole idea of Shakespeare in the digital age:
The goal of this Shakespeare in Community course, then, will be to discover Shakespeare while also considering together what it is for us to discover and un-cover Shakespeare in the digital age.
Ultimately, this course will be focused on building a global community around the study of Shakespeare. And so one of our central goals will be to use Shakespeare’s plays as an occasion for creating important conversations that bridge cultures, languages, and geographies. Students in the course will also increase their digital literacies, learning new tools for reading, writing, critical analysis, and collaboration. The course will be both about Shakespeare and also about the digital humanities, encouraging learners to think critically about how digital tools (including MOOCs) can be used to investigate literary texts.
Over 16,000 people are signed up world-wide and it sounds as if it will be a stimulating course. Here’s the link.
