english literature online courses

english literature online courses

Exploring the Benefits and Impact of English Literature Online Courses

1. Introduction to English Literature Online Courses

English Literature, far from being an overly specialized, seldom read, or minor discipline, is significant and diverse. English scholars study English Literature recognizing its significant value well beyond its basic discipline. Including texts that are diverse, global, and more inclusive can make English classes more engaging and beneficial for all. Literature, it is argued, can create community between students reading and discussing texts together, offering everyone additional layers in which to see themselves, their world, and the human experience. Despite the positive benefits found in the literary classroom, many never receive the opportunity to understand at an educational level the vast possibilities found within English Literature.

This research paper is a broad overview of the benefits and impact that utilization of English Literature Online (ELO) courses can have upon an undergraduate student body. Arguments for promoting diversity within the English Literature classroom and expanding learning communities through the integrative use of new technologies are the main focus of this paper. The authors will explore key ideas about the role and value of English Literature in general to set a broader stage for discussion and then demonstrate why expanding access to those discourses contained within English Literature is relevant. Additionally, this discussion will briefly examine the use of online technologies, exploring implications and impacts on student holistic wellbeing that this shift to a new learning community could bring. The authors will focus essentially on a partial overview of the author’s specific ELO pilot impact and resultant student ideas on the rapidly evolving learning environment found in a “classroom” without conventional rules about time and space.

2. Advantages and Opportunities of Studying English Literature Online

Finally, and of course there is no question of an academic nature; students in an online course of English literature should have a profile even more open to teamwork, collaboration in shared activities, and helping their colleagues. Sometimes, they alone realize the strength and enthusiasm that arise from collective participation. Now, how many advantages and great opportunities that are presented to you who is going to study that subject to which you did not have the opportunity to attend classes until now? Yes, it is possible that you volunteer and that you can structure your participation there and become an excellent online student as well.

Several benefits arise from the practice and study of English literature through online courses. Are they actually advantages? Advantages over the traditional classroom and teaching method? Yes, they are, and they are not few either. I will only list the following: students attend classes according to their free time; they plan their course of study because they are aware of the course’s schedule; they alleviate many, if not all, those complications caused by regular daily sessions between institutions and students, because many work during the day and have no transportation to take them to the institution, many have no ways to transport them to and from transportation institutions, and etc.; students have the opportunity to read and reread the texts when they are about to do the activities and even during the progress of the course, in some cases of reflective forums; students break down those obstacles of teaching and learning determined by geographical location or institutions placed in remote areas and, consequently, serve a larger number of students, and profiting from the teaching of an extremely well-prepared instructor.

3. Challenges and Solutions in Online English Literature Courses

Sodden with history learned much as children learn the names of the kings of England, and talented as a result of the luck of being able to conform to such repetitive pedagogy whose pretexts for engaging students are ever changing but whose values for assessment are as little negotiable as the quality of the finished products. Assessment and teaching at the universities is a major problem. Is it a system too well-known, too well-established and therefore too comfortable for so many, for us to fear the painless remedy of exposure to destructive though refreshing critiques? From the students’ point of view, surely much more harm than good comes from the division of the year into two equal parts whose pattern has become well delineated and is identifiable as “assessment at the end of a five-month course.”

Before inaugurating the subject of assessment, it is worthwhile to consider for a moment the difficulties that we find inherent in the subject of English literature. It is his method that immediately encounters and correctly highlights the problem itself: “But at a time when their responsiveness is most uncertain and their feeling for writing most unpredictable, the young must be caught up into unfamiliar modes of thinking if they are to become both acute readers and shapely writers of criticism – the kind of readers and writers who would have a place in a subject that was neither ‘soft’ nor invisible.” One is immediately attracted by the term ‘soft’ because the deficiencies of which T. S. Eliot warned in Two Principles of Criticism are ever present and are as a result unavoidable.

4. Innovative Approaches and Technologies in Teaching English Literature Online

That the seemingly impossible task of adequately translating the intense and visceral literary examination and discussion process into a teaching format that meets both the eager appetites and the individual learning characteristics of the entirely online-learning student has been lovingly discovered and submitted for verification and critique is the good news. Following a brief historical perspective of Internet-assisted voice, video, flash, and webcasting technologies, Poindexter and Rosenberg cluster and describe available and beneficial practical solutions associated with needs presented by various sizes of online sections of Literature Courses, including demographics, the art of questioning, answering, availability and role of the existing course management system, proper utilization of the most-beneficial existing technologies, and related policies and procedures. Insightful dispositions and further discoveries and investigative prospects are then illuminatingly and memorably presented in conclusion. Such straightforward assessment of the technology and findings within the context of preferred outcomes are both encouraging and exemplary.

5. Conclusion: The Future of English Literature Education in the Digital Age

Due to the significant shift towards blended or fully online university education because of the new public health environment engendered by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, outreach activities will have to practice using online tools and platforms in order to respond to the specific access requirements outlined above. The teaching tools and methods developed here may form part of a wider response to digital transformation of the university sector. Indeed, their lessons may well be translated into a useful general framework present for proper online curricular design and use. This need will depend only in part on whether prospective students have been currently given access to studying the subject at school; concern may also be required for students who have in the past benefited less from exposure to English curricular materials. Topics like the teaching lists of cases taken from Ancient Greece may draw from less of an accessible reservoir of information already available, whilst translations and discussions of the Odyssey and the Aeneid can ensure that students can dive straight into a study of the literature of Classical Antiquity, easy the unfamiliar.

This article has explored an initiative to ensure that diverse and inclusive membership of potential English Literature students are given more opportunities to engage with the subject by providing the chance to study English Literature in an exclusively online environment. This is a group who would benefit from increased exposure and interaction with the kind of thinking and learning associated with studying humanities courses, who may have the ability to benefit greatly from the knowledge and skills these degrees provide. The aspiration of outreach and learning communities here is an extension of the access to online learning resources, like Oxford’s podcasts, which are already freely available. By enabling potential English students to interact with these world-class learning opportunities, provided alongside teaching and support in preparation for an admissions process, the intention is to ensure that attending recruitment fairness activities and subsequent access summer schools does more to compensate for schools which are unable to offer the subjects and the locations when considering times and costs of activities open to fee-paying students.