Only 26 more to go . . .

The good news is that finding the remaining 26 essays, short stories, and poems online wasn't particularly difficult. It just took time. I was glad I had chosen to work on the OER class between semesters. Making the time to find the materials would have been far more stressful if I had also been trying to keep up with lesson plans and lectures and gradings in other classes. As it was, I just spent several days with lots of coffee and Google.

Latte courtesy of The Beanhive 
on Simmons Street

The pieces that proved most difficult to find were ones that I wanted to use at the beginning of the semester, talking about the Iroquois and Navajo creation stories. Recent editions of "The Norton Anthology" have done an increasingly good job of providing more diverse voices, such as those of Native Americans from the era, whereas the Rio Salado text I was going to use did not. Finding poems and stories online, however, by better known writers such as Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe was not a problem.

Eventually, I found links for all of the 26 pieces, and I added those links to the corresponding weeks to which they would be assigned on the class Moodle page as I went along. The final two pieces I ended up adding to the syllabus were available in the Rio Salado text. All in all, the search experience was a bit time-consuming, but not unpleasant. Spending a number of days immersing myself in searches for the material to use had some wonderful, unexpected benefits. For starters, I inadvertently came across some good secondary source material that I could, in some cases, share with students, and, at other times, use just for my own benefit to add to my own understanding. Furthermore, searching for the materials caused me to look at the texts and to consider the course objectives more holistically than if I had stuck to my old routine of assigning readings only from a text that already existed.