creative writing mooc

Wesleyan Launches First-Ever Creative Writing Specialization on Coursera

Wesleyan will present the first-ever creative writing specialization on the Coursera platform, beginning Feb. 9. Taught by four award-winning authors, the specialization is open to anyone with a love of reading or a drive to invent a story or tell their own.

Titled “Creative Writing: The Craft of Story,” the specialization will include four courses, plus a capstone. The courses are:

• The Craft of Plot , taught by Brando Skyhorse, visiting assistant professor of creative writing in English
• The Craft of Setting and Description , taught by Amity Gaige
• The Craft of Character , taught by Amy Bloom, distinguished university writer-in-residence, director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing
• The Craft of Style , taught by Salvatore Scibona, the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor of English
• (Capstone) Crafting Your Story , taught by Scibona.

The first MOOC launches Feb. 9, with subsequent courses starting every week after that.

Learners may view lectures in each MOOC, with the exception of the capstone, for free, or they may pay to access assignments and peer review aspects of the courses. Passing all assignments unlocks the capstone course, which grants learners a certificate of completion.

“We’re very excited to present this first-of-its-kind specialization on creative writing,” said Jennifer Curran, director of Continuing Studies and the Graduate Liberal Studies Program. “So many people have a story to tell—whether fictional or taken from life—and this specialization will empower them to do so in a way that will absorb a reader’s attention from the beginning and hold it through the end. It’s an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the country’s best contemporary writers, and share work with fellow learners from around the world.”

Writing completed by learners as part of the course will be evaluated and given feedback through an online peer review system. Instructors will provide a clear rubric for students to assess each other’s success in achieving the goals of an assignment.

Three of the top-performing students in the specialization will receive a prize: free tuition, room and board to the Wesleyan Writer’s Conference, which is celebrating its 60 th year in June. Upon completion of their first assignment, all learners will receive an 80 percent discount on a suite of writing software courtesy of Write Brothers.

More information about the instructors:

Amy Bloom is the Distinguished University Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan and director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing. Previously, she was senior lecturer of Creative Writing in the English Department at Yale University. Bloom has been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bloom has also written articles in periodicals including  The New Yorker ,  The New York Times Magazine ,  The Atlantic Monthly ,  Vogue ,  Slate , and  Salon.com . Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories , The O. Henry Prize Stories  and several other anthologies, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her sixth book, Lucky Us , appeared from Random House in 2014.

Brando Skyhorse is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Wesleyan. His debut novel,  The Madonnas of Echo Park , received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been awarded fellowships at Ucross; Can Serrat, Spain; and was the 2014-2015 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Washington at George Washington University. His latest book,  Take This Man: A Memoir , is out now in paperback.

Amity Gaige is a visiting scholar in creative writing at Wesleyan. She is the author of three novels: O My Darling , The Folded World , and Schroder , which was shortlisted for The Folio Prize in 2014 and named one of the best books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and many others. Gaige is also the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, fellowships at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and a Baltic Writing Residency. Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Literary Review and others.

Wesleyan also recently launched another new MOOC on Coursera: Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us About Memory , taught by Professor of Psychology, Emeritus John Seamon.

• Psychology Department
• Shapiro Creative Writing Center
• Writing at Wesleyan

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The Writing University

Menu drawer options, free online course material: creative writing mooc-packs.

These deliverable online creative writing courses are free, ready to use out-of-the-box & available immediately

As many schools pivoted to online learning during COVID, the University of Iowa provided resources and teaching materials for instructors to use immediately for creative writing courses everywhere. The International Writing Program at the University of Iowa has been creating free Creative Writing MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) for several years, and has accumulated a rich archive of these online courses, offered as "MOOC-Packs."

These MOOC-Packs are deliverable online creative writing courses, ready to use out-of-the-box, available immediately , for all teachers and students who need to transition to online courses. A MOOC-Pack provides a MOOC’s core content, packaged with a how-to guide and extra instructional materials. Using a MOOC-Pack, anyone can lead a writing class or a study group.

You can access all free MOOC-Packs on the IWP Distance Learning website .

ACCESS MOOC-PACK COURSES

MOOC-Packs Available

• Hidden Meanings : Creative Fiction, Non-fiction, and Facts  
• Stories of Place : Writing and the Natural World  
• Moving the Margins : Fiction and Inclusion  
• Power of the Pen : Identities and Social Issues in Poetry and Plays  
• Power of the Pen : Identities and Social Issues in Fiction and Nonfiction  
• Fiction: Storied Women MOOC-Pack (Arabic) كيف تكتب الكاتبات القصص: نساء حاكيات  
• Fiction: Storied Women MOOC-Pack (Spanish) Cómo los escritores escriben ficción: Mujeres en la narración Este MOOC-Pack lo guiará a través de un estudio progresivo de cómo los autores de todas partes del mundo abordan los diferentes aspectos de la escritura de ficción, desde la voz y el diálogo, hasta la trama y la estructura narrativa  
• Whitman's Civil War : Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, and Disaster  
• #Flashwrite Teen Poetry MOOC  
• How Writers Write Fiction I  
• How Writers Write Fiction II  
• How Writers Write Poetry I  
• How Writers Write Poetry II  
• Every Atom: Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"  

All teachers and students of creative writing worldwide can access these free classes and implement the lessons into their coursework immediately. Updates and new material will be posted ongoing here as well.

For questions, contact the IWP Distance Learning staff .

Additional Resources

We will be updating this page and website with more online teaching resources. For an actively edited creative writing resources list, you can also view this co-authored and rapidly evolving resource, Teaching in the Context of Coronavirus , with contributors including: Jacqueline Wernimont and Cathy N. Davidson.

• International Writing Program

Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot

• From www.coursera.org
• Free Access
• Fee-based Certificate
• 4 Sequences
• Introductive Level
• Subtitles in French

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Course details.

• Week 1 - Plotting a Course In this module, we'll learn essentials about plot definitions and mechanics. What is plot? How does plot shape a narrative? What makes a strong plot? How is plot different from a story? We'll also discuss how plot works in actual books you're probably familiar...
• Week 2 - The Power of Structure In this module we're going to learn what story structure is and how by understanding structure you can learn how to sequence the events in your plot to help maximize your own storytelling abilities.We'll talk about Freytag's pyramid, the five act structure, ho...
• Week 3 - A Scene in Motion Scenes are the building blocks of storytelling. But what is a scene? And how does a scene move plot forward? In this module we'll learn about the difference between telling and showing, the five key elements each scene should have, offer some examples of effec...
• Week 4 - Cut It Out This modules deals with the specifics of editing and revising your work. This process of revision starts with the first draft (which will now become your second draft) and continues until the manuscript’s ready to send to an agent. Included here are a twenty-o...

Prerequisite

Instructors.

Brando Skyhorse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing English

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