John Milton: Paradise Lost (MiltonX)
Updated August 9, 2018
About this course
First published more than 350 years ago, Paradise Lost retells the biblical story of Adam and Eve in English heroic verse, imitating classical models of epic poetry. Milton’s poem, along with its arguments regarding free will, tyranny, and slavery, informed modern conceptions of civil liberty, republican government, and free speech. In the United States, men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams credit Milton’s poem as having shaped their ideas of religious and civil liberty in a democratic republic.
In this DartmouthX course, learners will use the Milton Reading Room’s online resources and links to contribute to an ever-growing body of scholarship. Originally developed in 1997 by Dartmouth's Professor Thomas Luxon and his students, The John Milton Reading Room is an online scholarly edition of all of Milton’s poetry in English, Latin, and Italian, and selected prose works in English.
The annotations and glosses to Paradise Lost in the Reading Room not only help readers make their way through a notoriously difficult poem, they also provide links to the classical, biblical, religious, and historical works to which the poem so frequently refers. This makes informed engagement with Milton’s epic poem more possible than it ever has been.
This course is being offered by Dartmouth College on edx.org. The following are the members of the course team:
- Thomas Luxon, Course Instructor and Professor of English at Dartmouth College
- Michael Goudzwaard, Learning Designer, Dartmouth College
- Dan Maxell Crosby, Sr. Media Producer, Dartmouth College
- Laura Braunstein, Digital Humanities Librarian, Dartmouth College
- Wendel Cox, Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian, Dartmouth College
You can find the course instructor, TAs, and other course team members on the discussion board during the initial four weeks of the course.
Course Learning Objectives
- New ways to read and understand Milton’s Paradise Lost
- How to research and pose questions in the service of reading
- Annotation of the poem (some annotations may be incorporated into the Milton Reading Room)
- Experimentation with crowd-sourced scholarship about Paradise Lost
- Reading strategies that can be applied to any early modern text
Learning Assessments and Grading
You will have an opportunity to assess your learning and receive your course grade with the following learning activities and assessments. The following is the grading breakdown for the each,
- Hypothesis Annotation: In each module, there are prompts that ask you to annotate the readings in the Milton Reading Room. These activities are designed to guide your reading, to interact with the text, and other learners in this course. This is 50% of your course grade.
- Discussion: In each module, you will be promoted to post in the Discussion forums, based on your Hypothesis annotations and reading of the Milton Reading Room. This is 50% of your course grade.
Verified Certificates
Like many edX.org courses, you have the opportunity to earn a verified certificate for your participation in this course. Key dates for both enrolling in the verified track and completing course assignments for a grade, can be found
Course Schedule and Dates
This course is offered in a self-paced format. You may complete the activities and assignments anytime that the course is open until December 31, 2018. Our intentions are to leave the course available as an archived course for at least the next year. All activities will be available after the course concludes, however you won't be able to earn a Verified Certificate after that date.
Academic and Discussion Policy
As members of the MiltonX course community, we expect students in our course to be collegial and civil in their behaviors within the course. We encourage individuals to reach out directly to the edX Help Center when issues arise. Please use the discussion space to ask questions and share ideas. If you have a specific question, please make sure to mark as a question in the platform so that your classmates and the course team can best address your questions.