Learning at Home
While we’re at home and practicing social distancing, many of us are looking to learn something new or hone our skills. There are a lot of classes being offered online right now. Here are a few that are both free and potentially of interest to those of us in the speculative arts.
Let’s start with the courses that happen at a specific time:
- Comics: Art in Relationship course offered by California College of the Arts. The course starts on April 1st, but you can also start immediately after signing up. It has five sessions, with about ten hours of expected coursework per session.
- OwnVoices Worldbuilding: Turning Real Life Experiences into Fantasy. Join Francesca Flores and Romina Garber for a live webinar and question-and-answer session on worldbuilding, April 9th at 6 p.m. eastern. Be sure to register in advance.
- Worldbuilding 101 with Kristina Pérez with LIVE Q&A, on April 24th, 12 p.m. eastern. Be sure to register in advance.
Next up are a slew of classes that you can check out anytime:
- If you’ve been thinking about making your own game, you may want to look into The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Pixel Art Games. The class, which is taught by Rich Graysonn, is free for a limited time.
- Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, from the University of Michigan on Coursera, has a fantastic reading list and syllabus.
- Having trouble writing? Kate Heartfield’s free seven-day course on Building (or Rebuilding) Your Writing Practice is free and available for you to go at your own pace.
- Learn how to create HTML5 and JavaScript games from scratch and build a browser-based game to distract yourself and others with this free course.
- Kickstarter Best Practices for Fiction is a free course for those of you looking to learn how to more effectively fundraise for your fiction.
- If you’re looking to learn how to line edit your book, you’ll want to check out this free five-day class by Stacy Juba.
- A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction is a little bit meta—it’s a course on science fiction that includes tools for teaching about the genre, so if you’re looking to learn and also pass it on, this may be the class for you. It’s also entirely free.
If you’re willing to sign up for skillshare.com, you can get two weeks for free. And if you do so, you might be interested in these course offerings:
- Flash Fiction: Writing Tiny Beautiful Stories by Kathy Fish
- Writing Suspense: How to Write Stories that Thrill in Any Genre by Benjamin Percy
Have you found a really neat class that you’d like to share with our readers? Or perhaps you’re teaching one? Be sure to tell us about it on our forums!
Cislyn Smith
Cislyn Smith is the secretary of the Dream Foundry and a poet and short story writer who calls Madison, Wisconsin home. Her wordy work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, and Diabolical Plots. She has been known to crochet tentacles, write stories at odd hours, play ridiculous numbers of games, make lots of lists, and study stone dead languages. She is occasionally dismayed by the lack of secret passages in her house. She lives with the amazingly photogenic kitties that appear in the Dream Foundry newsletter, and also some nice humans.
In addition to her Twitter, she can be found online on Mastodon and on Patreon.