MSU offers free online course on Laura Ingalls Wilder

In 1974, families in the United States became acquainted with the Ingalls family through NBC's pop culture phenomenon "Little House on the Prairie." Forty years later, the life and works of novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder — on whom the television series was loosely based — are still being studied, read and taught.

Pamela Smith Hill, English faculty at Missouri State University, will begin a free online course "Laura Ingalls Wilder: Her Work and Writing Life" on Sept. 22, and she will offer another course on Wilder's later works in early 2015, according to a release from the university.

This is Missouri State's first semester offering Massive Open Online Courses — a recent trend in higher education.

For those who haven't previously read Wilder's books, Smith warns that the required reading for the course will deviate greatly from small screen adaptation.

"The book 'Little House on The Prairie,' for example, takes place on the Osage Diminished Indian Reserve in Kansas, not in Walnut Grove, Minn., where the TV series is set," Hill said in the release. "Neither the real nor the fictional Ingalls family settled in Walnut Grove."

Hill grew up approximately 45 miles from Laura Ingalls Wilder's home in Mansfield, Mo., and she — an aspiring author herself — was fascinated with the idea of a successful writer being from her own area of the world.

"I'd always thought writers were from New York or New England; I had no idea that someone who wrote books could live and work in the Missouri Ozarks. The Little House books inspired me to keep writing," she said in the release. "When I moved to South Dakota, where Wilder set five of her novels, I began to appreciate more keenly the depth of Wilder's craft and her achievement in American children's literature."

The course will explore Wilder's writing life and the first four books in the Little House series, and more specifically, the relationship between Wilder's personal life and her fiction. Hill also hopes to answer many questions about the qualities that make Wilder's work stand the test of time.

Want to take the course?

Go to outreach.missouristate.edu/180450.htm to enroll. Anyone can register. You don not need to be a student at MSU. The online course is free and does not provide college credit. Interested participants can enroll at any point during the eight weeks of the class. Participants will need access to several of Wilder's books, which may be available at local libraries.