Collaborative authorship : publishing e-books on fantasy and science fiction with BA and MA students

The text is a narrated PowerPointSince the academic year 2013-14 I have published 9 e-books with my BA and MA students in English Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, on topics ranging from Harry Potter to the American film documentary, passing through feminism and a guide on the SF short story. All these e-books can be downloaded for free from the digital repository of UAB and have generated so far more than 20000 downloads. This has radically changed my own pedagogy as I tend to consider now my elective courses as chances to produce new e-books, with a strong emphasis on project-oriented learning and collaborative authorship by the students. In this short talk I offer an overview of the method I use to organize teaching and students' authorship in the EFL Literature and Culture MA and BA courses under my responsibility. Each e-book consists of about 50 short essays, ranging from formal academic papers to personal pieces and this requires plenty of advanced planning to distribute the work according to each level (BA, MA). The central idea behind this methodology is a double thesis. On the one hand, students learn far more by being exposed to information on 50 texts (of which they read/see a selection) than by intensively teaching just a few texts. On the other hand, collaborative authorship with a view to online publication makes them far more demanding about the quality of their own work than traditional assessment by the teacher of texts limited to the classroo