This was an online class taken over the Summer.

Professor Little is an energetic professor that is clearly invested in Shakespeare. His lectures share his own critical perspectives on Shakespeare's major plays.

The course itself is very poor. It's organized how you would expect for a summer course: video lectures, board discussions, quizzes, and essays. Though there isn't anything inherently wrong with it, the course is painfully plain. By far the largest issue with the course is the quizzes. Not only are the quizzes timed and monitored through Repondus lockdown browser + webcam à la Big Brother style, the quiz questions are nothing short of BS. According to our "course information" page on CCLE (a sham of a syllabus which this class doesn't have), our assigned readings are annotated versions of Shakespeare's plays. The questions asked on the quizzes, however, involve Shakespearian actor names and loosely related paintings that you might be able to answer correctly if you critically extrapolate from extremely minor and obscure details. Couple with that, the final exam is composed of these quiz questions and have a combined worth of 40% of your total grade. Almost half your grade is reliant on questions that feel less of an examination of your mastery over the subject matter and more of garbage trivia that you could probably look up in a second. All of this is overshadowed by your laptop's monitor and microphone turned on that stares you down making sure you don't cheat (Respondus has an eye tracker).

Based on purely the quizzes alone, I cannot recommend this class to anybody.

This was genuinely one of the most stressful classes that I have taken at UCLA. Professor Little wants you to regurgitate back to him the things that he finds interesting, not to provide your own analysis or interpretations in your work. He decides within a a few class sessions whether or not he likes you, and if he doesn't, you're basically screwed for the quarter. He was *over an hour* late to multiple meetings with me, and he was not understanding of my need to miss class for a major surgery. For my final project, I waited to get his approval on my topic, wanting to make sure that I didn't write a paper he didn't like on principal, only for one of his first comments on the paper to be that he didn't like what I was doing with the topic. The quizzes are random and very difficult, because they're often not directly related to class materials. Cannot recommend enough that you stay away from this class.

Professor Little does play favorites and unless he likes you from the beginning, there's no changing the outcome. His favoritism (or lack thereof) absolutely determines your grade. In our class, select individuals were excused from the midterm for no explicit reason other than "they demonstrated giving 110%." Professor Little would not, however, explain the criteria for "110%." He mentioned receiving (understandably) frustrated emails from students, and in the following classes, he was incredibly defensive about his "excellent methodology." It was very uncomfortable and unprofessional. The individuals excused from the midterm were the same students who were disproportionately called on, in relation to other students, to answer questions and provide feedback during our discussions. I was one of the students who did have to take the midterm. There was no grading criteria and his instructions were "treat it like a game! Have fun with it!" After putting in the same level of attention, effort, and detail I would for any other midterm, he gave a surprisingly low grade with no explanation. Your grades in this class have nothing to do with how hard you work or how well you learn the material--it really only has to do with whether or not Professor Little likes you as a student. To further emphasize the irrationality of his grading: Professor Little promised one student an A for the entire class (before the final paper) because they answered a question in a way he liked. It's a gamble for this class: if he likes you, you're golden. If he doesn't, your GPA is going to plummet. From what I observed with other classmates, he seems spiteful if you raise problems regarding the grading inequity. I sought advice from another professor about the situation. Apparently, Professor Little's violation of his own syllabus in regard to grading and randomly excusing some students could be taken up with the English Department, since what he's doing is illegal... but who has time for that kind of drama? It's also worth mentioning that he will mock students, and continued to do so even after one student tried to set boundaries. Oh, and there is constant commentary about day drinking.

I took the online course back in Summer 2019 and would like to say that it was a flaming bag of garbage. The lectures were like 10 minutes long for each play, and I don't believe Arthur Little provided any office hours. I enjoyed taking the class with the TA, Andrew Wagner, he was insightful and genuinely a great help. But, Arthur Little played such a small role in the course that he was negligible. The absolute worst part of the course, which is more than enough of a reason not to take it, is the quizzes. As another reviewer mentioned, these (5) quizzes are 20% of our grade, made of 12 multiple choice questions each, and are ridiculously impossible to answer. I failed 2 of the 5, which doomed me from an A. Then, the final exam is composed of 50 questions directly from the online quizzes throughout the quarter, and is worth another 20% of our grade. Don't even consider cheating, even though these answers could be found in 2 seconds by searching the internet, because Respondus + Eye Tracker is enabled! 40% of our grade was dedicated to multiple choice questions that were nearly impossible to answer and some were extremely abstract making connections to popular culture that were tenuous at best! Participation consisted of lame discussion boards (20%), which they grade harsh but never provide any feedback on, and a group presentation (20%) that was based on another odd contemporary analysis of Shakespeare in popular culture. The final 20% was the term paper (6-8 pages), which was relatively easy.

I would recommend this course if it was face to face and did not consist of those horrendous exams (deliberately designed so course grades were low). If you have the chance to take Arthur in a synchronous or in person class MAYBE go for it (his lectures were interesting), but I WOULD NEVER recommend anyone take this asynchronous course!

This was my favorite English class I’ve taken so far. Professor Little makes Shakespeare incredibly engaging. The class is based around a play a week, with two of the longer plays being a week and a half. There is one final paper, a midterm, and a final. He values class participation over everything else, and will make the class easier to manage based in a class’s work ethic in the discussions seen through their mastery of the readings. If your class has good enough participation, let’s just say the final isn’t necessarily set in stone. I would take this class again and again, it fostered a love for Shakespeare that I wouldn’t have gotten from any other class. Totally recommend

Short: textbook isn't actually necessary, show up to class and take extensive notes, be vocal, study who says what in plays and why.
Long: I honestly think the class should be a requirement rather than the boring clusters because before the class I completely hated Shakespeare. His lectures were so engaging the way my friends in I took notes was as if we wanted to catch every word he was saying because it all mattered. He definitely pays attention to attendance and who speaks in class. He remembered everyones names which a lot of professors only do based on who speaks.
He doesn't use slides and the class is heavily reliant on the text. Technically if the class is major plays you really don't need to buy the book, you can just find it online. However, he often goes back to the text to have us go over certain sections he doesn't think we "thought outside the box" for. He wants us to say any ideas we perceive as crazy because to him they're actually not that crazy. It great because it allowed us to genuinely think outside of the box.
Midterms are easy enough if you actually took notes and read the plays instead of sparks notes. They're basic English midterms with ID's, definitions, and essay portions. My class did well enough on the tests that he gave us a pretty easy and open ended essay final.