Title: The Context of Dracula
Audience: First-year students
Date: Spring 2022
Software Utilized for the Project: Articulate Storyline and Audacity
About the Project: I have twice taught a first-year seminar on vampires and one of the first texts we read is Bram Stoker’s Dracula in its entirety. It is by far the most important work on vampires in the English language and it does a great job of setting up a key theme of the class, which is the concept of perspective. However, the novel is very long and takes up nearly a third of the class. Students are much more engaged with the more modern short stories that use vampires to explore social issues and have asked for more time with those. As one part of cutting down class time spent on Dracula, I would like to give them a homework lesson on the context of the novel. This would be posted in the campus LMS (Moodle), which I already used for keeping track of grades, so keeping track of lesson completion would be streamlined.
I created this interactive lesson in Articulate Storyline for my Introduction to Authoring course in Spring 2022. The lesson was designed to meet the following learning objectives:
After engaging with this online lesson, students will be able to:
- Name the author of Dracula and a few key facts about him
- Define “epistolary novel”
- Recite some of the characteristics of Victorian England and Gothic literature
- Place the novel Dracula in a timeline of other well-known pieces of vampire literature
I am particularly proud of the timeline as it required some advanced trigger programming that was beyond what was taught in the course. It originally had images of the book covers, but I removed them when I was unsure about copyright. Upon further reflection, the book covers would have added a lot to the experience and I cannot imagine that any publisher would have cared if I had used the images of the covers, as it would be promoting their books.
I hope to one day have the opportunity to teach this class again. This will be one important tool in condensing our time spent on Dracula so we can spend more time on more modern vampire stories.