Sunday, December 7, 2014

An exciting new online book club!

Just a quick post to share something I think is wonderful: there is a new MOOC (Massive Online Open Class) that started on the EdX MOOC platform: a year long book club/English literature class, taught by Berkeley professor Maggie Sokolik.  There will be one classic book a month taught for the next 12 months, and you can sign up for each month individually.  The class starts out now, December 2014, with A Christmas Carol, and will continue in January with Huckleberry Finn.  Here is a short interview with Professor Sokolik with more explanation about the course on the EdX blog.

I, for one, and very excited about this - not only have I not really read a lot of the great classics of English literature (having a degree in French literature), but there isn't much opportunity here in Belgium to belong to an English speaking book club.

Here is the complete list of books the course will cover:

December: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
January: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
February: Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
March: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
April: Dubliners, James Joyce
May: Dracula, Bram Stoker
June: The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
July: A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
August: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
September: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
October: Room with a View, EM Forster
November: Call of the Wild, Jack London


I already took one MOOC through EdX this year (The Science of Happiness) and I really enjoyed the self paced learning environment, and so I am looking forward to continuing with the BerkeleyX Book Club.

Interested?  Check it out!

1 comment:

Joy said...

This looks awesome! Don't know if I can do December, but maybe starting in 2015. Thanks for the recommendation!