To be clear, teaching AP Style or lead writing to students I can’t work with in person is definitely different. I like sitting next to students at a computer to go through edits, and I think explaining the nuances of writing and editing are best done face to face.

But teaching news writing online offers unique chances to interact with students, and to connect students to each other at the same time. For my Writing and Editing for Multimedia class at the University of New Mexico, I’ve been using Twitter as a space outside our discussion boards where students can talk and learn about journalism.  

These public posts put students in touch with new journalism education resources, they force students to read and analyze current reporting, and they teach students the value of having a professional Twitter account for discussing reporting in a way that a class-only discussion board can’t.

Here’s how I’ve used this approach so far.

A social media presence assignment

It all starts with one assignment that students work on each week throughout the semester. The idea is for learners to have a consistent (at least three times a week) presence on Twitter focused on journalism or journalism education. Students tweet about articles, videos or photos and then talk about the quality of the journalism — not the content. For example: Does their audience think the lead works? Do the photos help tell the story? Do multimedia elements distract from the piece?

This isn’t a social media class, and there isn’t much time to spend on the basics of using Twitter. But to help get them started, I go through hashtags, usernames and other beginner aspects. (I also provide guides like this and other information that points to the usefulness of Twitter in journalism.)

Once students realize we’re not tweeting about lattes and sunsets here, the work begins. Their first concern often is that they won’t have enough to tweet about. I address this by prompting them to post tweets about our weekly topics.

Here’s a lead to start off our discussion this week, #CJ278. What do you notice about the writing? What makes it strong? What specific details help tell the story? https://t.co/fl5FbMjT7n #newswritingonline

— Kate Nash Cunningham (@katenashnm) March 19, 2018

So when they study lead writing in class, they look for story leads, post them and talk about why they were effective. (Or not.)

This is a great example of when you would want to use a delayed lede instead of a direct lede. Here the lede allows the writer to take a more creative approach by setting a scene to tell a short story. #CJ278 https://t.co/Psj8rO2rWq

— Nicholas Aragon (@naragon97) March 22, 2018

When they study headlines, they look for examples and post those.

NPR’s headline in this article is effective. It’s condensed, to the point and follows the rules of headlines. #CJ278 https://t.co/4hJnezSRV0

— Lainey Jameson (@livewithlainey) March 6, 2018

These exercises get them reading news stories and thinking about the mechanics of how those stories came to be, something I think can only help them as they start to write their own stories.

I also tell students they can use Twitter to look for sources or to post their stories once published. To keep this all together (and to make grading easy) students use a hashtag for class. At the end of the semester, students write a short reflection on what they learned, what went well (and didn’t) and how they will continue to use Twitter in the future.

Quickly connecting to outside resources

Twitter users recognize the value of the breadth of resources available on pretty much any topic, and journalism and journalism education are no exception. There are ACES chats on editing to join, Thomson Foundation Facebook Live seminars on mobile reporting to watch, or other resources including the NPR training site to be consumed.

It’s much easier and faster to retweet announcements about those events than going into our learning management system and posting something students might not read in a timely manner. For some chats, I offer extra credit if students participate and tweet five things. This incentivizes students to log on often to see what’s happening and enriches the class beyond the materials posted. My hope is that they follow a variety of accounts they otherwise might not have known about, and they continue to fill their feeds with helpful material well beyond class.

Ten points extra credit if you watch and tweet at least five things you learn, #CJ278 #CJ375 #newswritingonline This could really help prepare you for upcoming assignments. https://t.co/JigkDE0YxK

— Kate Nash Cunningham (@katenashnm) February 12, 2018

Strengths and weaknesses of this approach

One thing I really like about this assignment is that students are learning a few things at once. They are looking for different types of news and thinking about what makes a story strong or a headline weak. At the same time, they also are building their professional social media skills. They also are thinking about appropriate ways to communicate in public forums. As they post, I emphasize that tweets for class should be professional and well-written, and for the most part, they are.

I also like that students who are new to Twitter (and even express reservations about using it) generally come to see the value of it. I’ve had students say they deleted their accounts when the assignment was over, but they still learned something from doing it.

One challenge — and it’s one I have in my in-person classes as well — is getting students excited to use social media for school. To many students, it’s still a place to show off with pics of friends or pets and not something they want their professor to read. I encourage them to create “work” accounts if that makes them more comfortable, and I create lists of each class instead of following each student. To keep students engaged on Twitter, I try to be funny and personable. I also post job ads that require social media skills, so they can see how all of this could come in handy after graduation.

Join us!

The beauty of having a class hashtag is that anyone can join in the conversation. I use #CJ278 for this class, but I also use #newswritingonline in hopes of connecting to other educators who teach news writing at other institutions.

Kate Nash Cunningham is the social media editor for MediaShift. She teaches digital journalism at the University of New Mexico. Follow her @katenashnm.

The post How to Use Twitter to Connect Online Students to News appeared first on MediaShift.

I love new trends in broadcasting, and nothing is hotter today than podcasting, those episodic audio or video programs available for download by an audience.

Despite terrestrial radio’s consistent hold on listeners, podcasting has seen an ever-present increase of listeners with 21-24 percent growth year-over-year. Can you believe the largest growth is coming from the age 18-34 demographic?

When we see a media gaining ground in culture, it’s the right moment to invest a staff’s time and resources into becoming prolific in that medium, and that’s what we’ve done at Ritenour High School to build students’ skills and their confidence as journalists.

Thinking Specifically About Format

First, we must understand that podcasts are very specific, topic-oriented shows. I consider them comparable to magazines; my students get that concept. Creating too big of a topic can leave students disoriented about what to share with their audience. Keep it simple, yet leave room for multiple episodes.

The KRHS program at Ritenour High School offers students the option to focus on a specific beat for the semester. Within each beat, we offer multiple programs:

• School News: KRHS411 and Ritenour Way
• Entertainment: Ultimate Media Rewind and Things that Suck
• Sports: Scoop on Sports, Husky Sports Zone, Coach Talk and Athlete of the Month
• Investigative Reporting: What is Ritenour Made Of?, Living Hispanic in America, and You Don’t Know My Story

Once students connect with a group and are assigned a podcasting topic, they take on the role of reporters with ease. They love interviewing and talking with fellow students, once they get over those first-time jitters.

Managing the Equipment

You are only as good as your microphone. With the increase in audio recording, many companies have jumped on the bandwagon to create easily accessible and affordable equipment. B&H Audio and Video has made purchasing easier by providing bundled deals for podcast beginners.

If you’re interested in moving beyond your classroom walls, consider using handheld recorders like the Zoom brand. After my students used these once, they never wanted to use anything else.

The Test: Would you listen to it?

It’s the first question I want students to ask themselves about a podcast: Would you listen to it? Don’t create a piece for a class project; create it for an audience. Asking your audience to listen is much more difficult when they have so many other options.

When my students start, I keep them to two minutes of content. With amateur content, it’s a good rule of thumb. Keeping it shorter will help learners create a concise message.

Junior Justin Lopez writes his sports broadcast before recording his podcast. (Photo: Israel Rendon)

Does it leave me with new information? Have I gotten a new understanding on a topic that I didn’t have before? Can I see a different point of view that I never considered? These are all questions students can ask of their product to see if it’s worth listening to.

Still, There Are Challenges

Students say the hardest part of podcasting is putting the story together. (When is that not the hardest part for students?)

Some students prefer to start with questions: what do I want to know more about the topic? Who are the most important people who can answer these questions? Others need to start with research on a topic: if I’m looking into racial diversity in St. Louis, I need to look at the history and find data that supports the premise that this is a long-standing problem.

From there, I ask students to show the emotion behind the story. For me, it’s a major part of why I love podcasts. Hearing people share their personal truth makes it worth listening to. With an audio story, people speak freely, while facing a camera can seem more intrusive. This concept resonates with students when they are doing audio stories.

Editing, Editing and More Editing

I tell my students that the editing software has a short list of requirements. Basics include cutting audio, adding and overlaying tracks, and mixing sound levels. Audacity has been a staple for podcasting in my room since we began 10 years ago. It conveniently allows you to perform the basics, while still retaining some editing freedom.

For those wanting to use a Cloud software option with a Chromebook, or those who have multiple students who need to access a project, my students love using Soundtrap. It performs like Macintosh’s Garageband with added sound effects and instrumentals.

Hosting a Podcast

The boom in podcasting has brought a boom in hosting providers. Options like Soundcloud, Podbean or Podomatic allow for free websites or cheap pricing for yearly subscriptions. You can also use YouTube if you choose to make the sound files into videos with a photo or your logo in the background.

Senior Arieon Thomas-Smith, front, works with newest member Junior Isaiah Fowler on using audio editing software. (Photo: Israel Rendon)

Capitalizing on the Cool Factor

The value of podcasting reaches much further than the products students create. My students are amazing speakers, can navigate interviews with the proficiency of a pro, and they are growing confident as they hear themselves profess their thoughts.

This trendy medium can be a gateway to strengthening core journalistic skills, but the great thing is, most of my kids never know it. They just think they are being cool!

Jane Bannester works for the Ritenour School District, in St. Louis, Mo. Currently she teaches the nationally awarded KRHS Media program. Jane speaks locally and nationally on topics of Podcasting and Drone journalism. In 2017, Jane was recognized as the Missouri Journalism Educator of the Year,  a recognized Broadcast Advisor by the Journalism Education Association, and made the 2017 MediaShift EducationShift20 list for innovative scholastic journalism educators.

The post How to Introduce Podcasting to the Journalism Classroom appeared first on MediaShift.

They are not not consuming news; they are just getting it and sharing it in a completely new way.

I realized this when the Marjory Stoneman Douglas student journalists broadcasted live via Snapchat and Instagram as their school, friends and teachers were being attacked.  Despite horrific circumstances, those student journalists kept the tape rolling to share with the world what was going on in that school. As a result, these young people created a movement that originated and now is communicated with their peers and the world strictly online.     

This means, as teachers, we need to meet our students where they are – online, all the time. It is challenging because you must constantly change with the technology and what is popular with students, but that is the reality of our business, and I’ll show you how my journey to an online journalism instructor has evolved.

My, How Things Have Changed

I started teaching online media courses in late 2013.  Facebook had been around for a while, but Twitter and Pinterest were fledgling outliers. Instagram and Snapchat were practically still in the womb.  

Fast-forward JUST FIVE YEARS and social media tools have exploded in popularity for teens and young adults.  They use devices to communicate – with their friends, parents, teachers, employers. They use social media to maintain their social lives by “liking” and “following” photographs, celebrities and even causes.  Students also learn about the world – good and bad – because of social media.

At our recent college learning day, I attended the “bricks, clicks and teacher tricks” session on how to learn about communicating and collaborating with students.  We had “appy hour,” learned about teacher time savers and dazzling design, but I was floored that some colleagues still argued about “student responsibility” and “why they [students] expect email responses faster than 48 hours.”  

I thought: students barely even use email anymore, and if I had to wait 48 hours for an answer to my question about an assignment, I would go nuts!  I realized in the session that while some of these tools are great for teachers, they are not necessarily good for the students beyond the face-to-face classroom.  Tools like Kahoot and Go Soapbox may be cool in class, but they are not especially useful online. Teachers seem to fear Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter – for a number of reasons – but that is where the students are, and we need to be there, too.

Transitioning from Face-to-Face to Online

I teach the gamut of media courses – introduction to news reporting, writing for mass media, writing for social media and introduction to public relations.  I teach all of them online, except introduction to news reporting (for now).

At first, this was a real struggle.  I was trying to teach online courses like my face-to-face-classes.  I quickly learned this was not possible. Online students typically take this type of format because they need the flexibility. They often work full time and go to school.

Face-to-face students meet with area public relations professionals. Online students participated via Twitter Chat at #ValenciaPRChat. (Photo: Rebecca Newman)

For the last five years, I have changed, rearranged, restructured and learned a ton of new skills because I am trying to make the learning work for my students.  Students don’t read textbooks. They do not wait patiently for me to get back to them via email. But they do like clarity and consistency. They also like assignments that are interactive and challenge them to practice real-world skills.  How do you do this? The answer is, it is a work in progress, but it can be done. Here are a few tips:

1. Use the social media that students use:  Obviously I have boundaries, but social media tools really do make it easy to give students quick feedback when they need it.  I use Twitter in my classes since that’s what journalists use. I permit them to DM me with questions and comments, and my response time is actually far faster than traditional email.

2. Live Stream guest speaker events:  Twitter Live and Periscope are great tools for livestreaming events with professional speakers.  Use whatever tool is comfortable for you and where you have the most followers, but FYI – students are no longer using Facebook.  For these events, I collect my student questions ahead of time, so they can “ask” questions during the event, too.

Such a great day @valenciacollege hanging w/ these talented @orlandosentinel reporters. Thanks for sharing your experiences and caring for our community! #WomenInMedia pic.twitter.com/0KYOdsVNSt

— Rebecca Newman (@ProfessorBec) February 14, 2018

3. Study the apps and available technology:  Do you want to hear students practicing interviews with sources?  Have them record it and send it to you in an audio file. Want to have students build their “professional brand”?  Give them an assignment building a LinkedIn profile. Want your social media students to be able to post “professionally” designed content?  Introduce them to Canva (free) and have them begin creating and posting. There are TONS of choices out there. Find the free and easy-to-use tools.  Share them and use them.

Caution – my Twitter blows up in T-minus 90 minutes! But feel free to join if you have ? for guests @GabrielleRusson, @OSAliciaD @KaylaOBMedia pic.twitter.com/7dLNR9AD0b

— Rebecca Newman (@ProfessorBec) February 13, 2018

4. YouTube is your friend: There is so much great content on YouTube.  Students like to watch videos, so let them. I use a great video from Dr. Kim Zarkin that teaches new journalism students how to use the AP Stylebook.  I then make up a series of quizzes that gets them using the book and recognizing important style elements.

5. Be present:  “Talk” to your online people — FREQUENTLY.  Each semester, I host virtual conferences (for a grade) via FaceTime, Skype or Google Hangout.  Not only is this simulating real-world distance meetings, it is an opportunity to check in with these people, so they can put a face with the stranger behind the computer screen.  Is it time consuming? Yes, but it is totally worth it.

There are so many ways to make online learning engaging and meaningful.  There are so many cool tools to use to make this work. Some come and go, but if you pay attention to the right people (other faculty and colleagues), the industry and the kids, you’ll know what is working and what is going to be obsolete.

Embrace online learning.  It is here, and it is the future.  

Rebecca Newman is a media professor at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida.  She is the faculty advisor of the Valencia College student news organization, Valencia Voice.

The post How to Make the Transition to Teaching Media Courses Online appeared first on MediaShift.

Finding a truly passionate distance educator in a field where much of the learning has to be practical (how to write, use a camera, record sound) has, in my experience, been difficult. Most people design curriculum with the on-campus student in mind, and then make amendments for the distance student.

However, journalism education by distance seems a natural fit. Journalists routinely have to work remotely, receiving briefs from editors thousands of miles away. They create and file stories using a diverse range of technologies, and need to be mobile, adaptable, social and able to negotiate complexity when conducting research.

So thinking of the roving correspondent, who can’t make it for critical training, is a way to conceptualize our students. I was inspired to think this way after working with a colleague at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He saw the future and tried to talk to us about “this thing called the internet.” He spent the fortnight on the media bus filing these digital stories while the rest of us worked manually. He was learning as he went, blowing us all away with his ability to file stories as instantly as was possible back then.

I  started, and continue, to design courses and assessment with him in mind. I view everything I see others do in the journalism classroom through the lens of how I would do that with my remote students (such as Aleszu Bajak’s recent fabulous piece about designing a journalism course around email newsletters — still thinking about that one). That’s because most of my students will never make it to the on-campus classroom. No flipped classrooms, no blended learning. My classes are totally online, fully-assessed and contribute to undergraduate bachelor’s degree.

For those new to distance or online education and trying to think about how to include remote students, I offer the following five initial tips to help your transition. They are based on years of mentoring, teaching, coping with a rapidly changing discipline, adjusting course and unit design, assessing and celebrating student success.

1. Shift Your Thinking

To be a great teacher of distance students, you have to believe in what you are doing. You need to be committed to providing the best possible education regardless of personal circumstance, and to pushing boundaries so graduates can be ahead of the game. I regularly hear peers complain about the trend to online education, lamenting how much easier it is to teach face-to-face. Many feel it is too hard to teach technology online and provide instant feedback on writing.

Of course it’s easier to teach face-to-face. But that’s not the point.

If we accept that to be the truth, then we give up the possibilities with our remote students who have stories that need to be told. The more remote the student, the more important it is to give them a voice.

So rather than wondering how we include the distance student, the better question is: How do we make distance students central to learning design? From that position, we can then include everyone else.

Picture the most isolated student who might have the best story to tell, and teach them. What do they need? If they have limited internet or resources, think about how you’re going to address this. Relying on hours of watching video lectures or lots of clips on YouTube may be less effective than asking the student to do the work, reflect, watch a shorter clip that refines their thinking, and do the same task again. Do they really need the latest podcasting kit for the task, or will sound recorded on a mobile be enough? How can you support the student to do in his or her living room what on-campus students might do in a studio?

Working through questions like this will focus you on what’s important rather than what’s easy.

2. Principles Rather than Technology

Technology is great and has been at the heart of discussions about journalism education for a while. However, it can dominate discussion at the expense of good learning design. Platforms change. Software changes. But the principle of telling a good story, verifying facts and making it interesting to readers or viewers doesn’t.

Where you need to use a technology, make it the industry standard. If there’s no industry standard, or newsrooms use different filing software platforms, then use something that’s transferable. For example, SoundCloud might be better and easier to use than Audacity, depending on the learning outcome.

Make use of existing learning materials, but don’t let students wander around looking for them.

Recommend a good tutorial on how to use Twitter, for example, or create a very short video yourself. But think more broadly about what you want the student to learn and do – creating connections, identifying sources, verifying facts. Twitter may be the best option, but maybe not—maybe the student can actually come to you with something better. It’s the principle that’s important.

3. Keep it simple

Students are easily overwhelmed with too much information, and we have a tendency in online environments to overload them with content and links, just because we can. We know that students generally are time poor and usually juggling multiple commitments. We also know that they will do what is required for assessment, but that assessment must consider time related to task. Distance students are particularly vulnerable to simply disappearing if it all gets too hard or too overwhelming. 

If you study with me, you’ll get one study guide of around four pages (PDF so you can download it). I’ll only use full texts if they are truly AMAZING. I don’t pad the learning environment with lots of links for the sake of it. If I do include links, I’ll be asking students to reflect/model/review what I am asking them to watch. So, avoid overcomplicating things. Your job as a discipline expert is to provide a platform for learning, and then ask them to find the information (promoting lifelong learning, research skills, information literacy…the list goes on). If I have extra resources or links, I’ll communicate these to students socially (via Twitter, for example).

4. Drive Learning Through Assessment, Not Content

We like to create content. We think we’re teaching students when we transfer knowledge. However, creating space for learning, and limiting content to support achieving the learning outcomes, is critical. Journalism is inherently social. Designing authentic learning tasks that facilitate connections requires you to be innovative, particularly in the ways you provide feedback and support to students without overwhelming yourself.

It is critical to front load your units or courses. Good orientation, clear instructions and minimal updates while the course is running will help you focus on engaging with students as a mentor and providing feedback rather than putting out bushfires.

5. Build confidence

Building confidence in distance student cohorts is difficult but crucial. Our journalism students need to be confident in their news-sense, and research, analytical and technical skills. We need them to back themselves when they identify a difficult story, and they need to cope with the pressures that come from public discourse.

Again, course design and assessment is important. Building in reflection, virtual peer review and collaboration, and response to feedback into assessment can address this. I also ask all my students to self-assess their work (and I teach them how to do this). Distance study requires independence, resilience, time management and self-motivation. Students will always drop out, but my distance students often outperform on-campus students.

When you are new to distance or online teaching, you will be battling on a number of fronts. Those roving correspondents need you to be committed to their success, they need to know how to tell a great story, they need you to guide them on what’s important, they need to learn actively and authentically, and they need to be confident.

If you keep these points at the forefront of your thinking, hopefully the rest will come.

Kate Ames is an associate professor with a background in journalism and public relations education. She works at CQUniversity in Australia and specialises in distance and online learning. She is passionate about providing equal opportunities for access to great education. You can see some of her online teaching in action by following @Kate_Ames on Twitter, or following #speech and #profcomm hashtags associated with @CQUni.

The post 5 Key Points for Journalism Educators Who Want to Teach Online appeared first on MediaShift.

Of course, like any utopian narrative, differentiated instruction is constrained because there will always be a range of skill levels in any class. It is even more complex when the course is online.

Yet in online journalism education, and particularly with college-level or adult learners who know their capabilities and goals, there is a real opportunity for highly responsive learning. In my experience teaching online journalism courses, I’ve forged a path into individualized learning through repetitive needs assessment, and although it’s time consuming, I think it’s worth a look for journalism educators as more coursework moves online.

What is Needs Assessment?

As part of most instructional design models, needs assessment (sometimes called front-end analysis) is an attempt to understand students’ skills and knowledge before instruction is designed and delivered. It’s essentially a pre-test, but in this case, I employed it repeatedly.

Although some keen instructors can understand their students’ abilities intuitively during the first few days of class or after the first major assignment, online learning includes a literal and philosophical distance, making intentional needs assessment valuable. And it makes sense to do it throughout a course; more input means better instructor decision-making and the ability to make instant adjustments for learners.

Teaching Journalism Advising Online

I kept this concept of repetitive needs assessment in mind as I remade three graduate online courses for scholastic journalism advisers through Eastern Illinois University. When these courses were first taught in the 1990s, the professor who designed them was on the cutting edge of distance education, but much has changed. When I endeavored to resurrect them as asynchronous classes in the summer of 2017, I had to reinvent them. Educational technology had evolved, and my students were a diverse group. Some were experienced and seasoned journalism advisers for high schools throughout the country. Others were brand new advisers, or just embarking on the beginnings of a scholastic media program in their schools. Still others were only from the education or journalism side of a curriculum, without experience of the other half.

My needs assessment of these learners was a purposeful and recursive plan of information-gathering. At the beginning, middle and end of each three-week, online course, students were asked to take a short (no more than five minutes in length) online survey, using Typeform, to explain their background knowledge, expectations, preferences and fears/reactions regarding both content and online learning.

Screenshot from the online summer, graduate course for journalism advisers offered through Eastern Illinois University. (Photo: Amanda Bright)

Structural Changes From the Nascent Moments

A number of responses to the needs assessments questions led to alterations in the structure of the courses:

• When students identified clarity of instructions as an online learning concern, I put explicit learning outcomes on the syllabus and within each online module. I also sent emails at the beginning of each module regarding expectations and provided formative assessment feedback within 24 hours.
• When students noted readings and discussions were how they learned best, I commented on each post, expanded and revised the reading selections and connected students to each others’ area of expertise to propel brainstorming and collaboration.
• Because students overwhelmingly desired specifics due to distance, I added extra assignment sheets and artifacts from other programs for reference and more ideas.
• After a student noted “the discussions weren’t much of a discussion” (their peers’ posts lacked interaction and cohesion), I quickly inserted three suggested topics for responses that created commonality.
• As concerns about a lack of face-to-face interaction with the instructor were expressed, I created more videos—beyond an introduction and conclusion multimedia presence—with comments or questions I would typically pose in a classroom while sharing my own advising experiences.

Making Content Changes Throughout the Course

I also turned my attention to the needs assessment data on perceived strengths and weaknesses regarding journalism advising, so I could make instant adjustments to the content of the course. Then, I went back into my LMS (learning management system) once again:

• When I saw trends in content weaknesses, I added more readings (some optional) on blind spots. I also provided specific examples of projects as a starting point for those who were unfamiliar with a concept.
• Keeping the readings in the course fluid with open educational resources, I added and subtracted articles up to a day before the next module started as I read response posts.
• Some students mentioned that a few readings didn’t apply, so I gave them the ability to add one or two readings of their own to a module of choice, allowing the learners to drive content, too.
• I kept notes on which learner was interested in what learning outcome from the beginning, and then researched and provided resources and responses for those goals through individualized discussion/responses.

Summative Assessments Individualized

At first, I had more academic-style, capstone assignments, as would befit a graduate-level course, but as I returned to the needs assessment data, I noticed reflection and practical application were more valuable for these learners. I adjusted the summatives to include both scholarly and reflective components. Then, learners’ work was shared to be used by other advisers as desired — adding to their bank of practical resources.

The Heavy Lifting Was Worth It

This experiment using a repetitive, needs-assessment based strategy to provide instant adjustments to an online course was far from easy. It was quite time-consuming; most online courses take high levels of investment in design at the outset, but once they begin, the intensity lessens. This model was the opposite. I spent at least two to three hours in adjustments and upkeep every day, and that did not include grading time.

However, there were also moments of responsiveness that allowed students to engage in a way they did not expect in distance learning. “Personally, I thought that this course was amazing; thoughtfully conceived; and well-executed,” one student said. Although these types of comments cause instructor elation, it also underlined how little some feel they take away from learning experiences:

“Wow, what a great group of readings! Thank you. I have become that teacher when, upon hearing that a PD is planned for what our school calls Professional Learning Mornings (PLMs for short), my brow furrows and I wonder what I will be able to take away from the session and apply to my classroom. Sadly, PLMs often disappoint, leaving feeling frustrated because I don’t always feel that I have learned anything. Give me something I can apply and I will try it out the next day. I blather on about this because, Module 5—like what I perceive to be a “successful” PD—has given me much with which to ruminate.”

This taught me that my plan for developing an online course would have to be frequently revised as the course went along if I wanted the best possible learning experience for my students. There’s still much to learn from learners, and here’s hoping that as online learning tools evolve, we can only increase the opportunities to repeatedly find out what our students need next — and then try to deliver it.

Amanda Bright is a former professional journalist who later spent a decade as a scholastic journalism adviser. Currently, Bright is the Education Editor for MediaShift, a journalism instructor and adviser at Eastern Illinois University and the Media Content Coordinator for Indiana State University Online; she also serves as the Social Media Director and Web Co-Administrator for the Illinois Journalism Education Association.

The post How to Create Online Journalism Courses with Instant Adjustments appeared first on MediaShift.

Can cannabis help address the opioid crisis? What is Northeastern University’s relationship with the environment? What about the university’s role in gentrification? And what is the future of digital storytelling?

Those are the themes of four new publications launched last week by undergraduate students in my course, “Digital Storytelling and Social Media,” at Northeastern’s School of Journalism. In groups, these young reporters used maps, timelines, podcasts, videos and interviews to probe these questions.

And they reported it all directly into email newsletters.

In the space of a few weeks, they conceptualized, audience tested, branded, reported and shipped their newsletters – “The Exit Drug,” “Northeastern’s Environment & Health Unearthed,” “NEU Impact” and “Testing Ground” – and will be creating two more issues before we adjourn for the summer.

I wanted to share a set of guidelines that I hope might help others develop similar courses.

Logos and themes for the email newsletter campaigns that students designed. (Photo: StoryBench)

Why a newsletter? Why not a blog?

Many of the same learning outcomes can be expected from a course designed around blogging, sure. But I see some added value in the newsletter format – and not just because they’re hot. Students learn the design process, how to A/B test subject and headlines, how to grow and segment audience lists, and how journalism should treat the highly personal email inbox.

Let the Students Choose Their Own Beat

The main ingredient to this course is letting the groups self-select along shared interests. I send around a poll on the first week of classes asking students to choose one of the following themes: 1) politics, 2) science, health and the environment, 3) criminal and social justice, 4) media or 5) other. The poll helps me group the students by a broad beat. The following week, I have them brainstorm – using sticky notes and whiteboards – and focus their ultimate newsletter theme.

Do User Interviews

Next, they head to the streets – or the dining hall or the library – to interview prospective readers, understand their news diets and figure out what they want to know about the themes they’ve chosen. The groups first develop a list of questions and an online poll to gather research on their audience – as well as build a list of email addresses. After the first newsletter ships, they repeat this process, continually iterating and improving their product. Encourage them to add friends and family to the email list. Reward the group with the largest reader list or highest open rate.

Have a Hands-On ‘Lab’ Section

We meet twice a week, and the first 100-minute class is reserved for dissecting case studies of digital journalism practices – from newsletter strategies to social media tactics to digital reporting tools to audience engagement – with the occasional guest speaker. The second weekly class meeting is designed as a “lab” section where students work on their newsletters, peer edit work, help each other find sources and learn new tools. “Ship day” is hectic with last-minute drafts and Mailchimp formatting issues, but it’s a relief for all once the newsletters are shipped.

Start the Reporting Early

As with any undergraduate journalism class, it’s tough to get sources to return emails or jump on the phone with students. Three weeks before the newsletter ships, I have students contact at least three sources for their story by email. I encourage students to send me drafts of email interview requests, questions, outlines and, of course, their stories – early and often.

Students in Aleszu Bajak’s Digital Storytelling and Social Media class at Northeastern University plan their email newsletter storytelling in groups. (Photo: StoryBench)

Make Sure to Learn New Digital Tools

On top of all the best practices, case studies and discussions, find space to let the groups tinker with new tools and consider whether or not they’re appropriate for the story they’re telling. Tools like Carto, Google My Maps, JuxtaposeJS, TimelineJS, StorymapJS, Chartbuilder, Google Sheets, Canva, Piktochart, Infogram and Giphy have all been popular. Make extra time during office hours to help students out with these tools.

*I ran the same class last semester and those newsletters – “Beneath the Blindfold” (on campus social justice), “Cortechs” (on psychology and technology), “College Town” (on college sports in Boston), and “Lolitics” (a satirical take on national politics) – were equally impressive.

Storybench’s editor is Aleszu Bajak, a science journalist and former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He is an alum of Science Friday, the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, and is passionate about breaking down the divide between journalists, developers and designers.

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In reality, innovation is easy to talk about, but difficult to undertake in a traditional university setting. Academic institutions can be even more resistant to change than legacy news organizations. Curriculum overhauls can take years. And even the most ambitious students are often afraid of taking risks that may affect their grades.

So how can journalism educators create space for more experimentation in the journalism classroom?

From 1999 to 2006, I was fortunate to work as an editor for a groundbreaking, local news website. At a time when some news organizations refused to even link to other websites, we built databases of public information, created interactive games and covered local communities by inviting residents to participate in the process. We distinguished ourselves by trying things that traditional news organizations couldn’t or wouldn’t.

While the news industry has evolved greatly in the last decade, that experimental mindset still guides my approach to teaching undergraduate journalism courses. Here are some practical ways I’ve worked to foster that same kind of innovation in my classroom.

1. Stay Inspired

If I want my students to explore new ways of reporting and telling stories, then they need a steady diet of amazing digital journalism. One way I’ve done this is to use the annual Online Journalism Awards as the one of the primary reading texts in my courses. Each week the students explore examples of award-winning journalism, we discuss and debate, and then I urge my students to imitate the approaches that inspire them.

2. Identify and Cultivate Audiences

A decade ago, I began requiring my students to create online publications for untapped audiences. Students with limited experience began covering local schools, governments, arts and culture communities, environmental issues, and youth and niche sports. In the process, they learned how to identify what audiences want and how to deliver it to them, as well as how to respond to feedback. This has become a standard practice now, but many of my former students still say it was one of the most valuable experiences in their journalism education.

3. Add Tech to Traditional Reporting

From Facebook to VR, my students are often the first to introduce me to new tools and platforms. My approach is to embrace whatever they are using and challenge them to try to use it in their reporting, not just their personal lives. I incorporate tech into traditional assignments, and we discuss the ethics and potential hazards for journalists. I don’t care whether they become a fan or user of any particular technology, but I do want them to learn the habit of constantly adapting.

Students use technology in the classroom. (Photo: Hero Image/Getty Images)

4. Make Space in the Syllabus

Like most teachers, I have a tendency to pack as much content as possible into a semester. I’m an educator, after all; my job is to impart what I know. However, I’ve also learned that experimentation requires time for brainstorming, false starts and collaboration. So each semester when I’m planning out my syllabus, I make sure to set aside multiple class periods with no lecture or structured activities. Instead, I ask students what they need, and that space often leads to the most surprising and rewarding interactions.

5. Reward the Risk-Takers

Grades can be one of the biggest barriers to experimentation. Students want to know exactly what is required to achieve a grade and aren’t inclined to try something they haven’t done before. So when it’s appropriate, I build an assessment of “creativity/risk” into my grading rubric. For example, when I gave an assignment to create a Vox-like explainer, the student who explained Brexit by baking a cake, cutting into pieces, and shooting and editing a stop-motion video earned a higher grade than the one who submitted a PowerPoint presentation. If students understand that an ambitious and imperfect project can earn a higher grade than a safe and well-executed one, then they have more incentive to push themselves. In addition, I regularly require multiple drafts and reward those students who revise and revamp.

6. Challenge Students to Rethink the Campus Newspaper

Like legacy news organizations, campus media outlets have their established traditions, platforms and revenue models. That means they are hard to change, but also the best places for students to innovate. Each semester, I have my students reinvent the editorial workflow of a typical campus newspaper. I ask them to articulate who their audience is, what the audience wants, when the audience wants it, and how they are going to reach them. Then I send students out to try to cover a typical campus story in a totally different way. Eventually, the exercises from class work their way into the editorial process of the student-run publications.

7. Invite Interdisciplinary Collaboration

When engineering and journalism students at my university worked together on sensor journalism projects (using sensors to gather and report journalistic data) as part of a 24-hour Hack-a-Thon, they accomplished things I could never have orchestrated in my classroom. I’m always looking for ways to connect journalism students with other disciplines.

A model for success. (Photo: Zamzum/Getty Images)

8. Model Experimentation and Failure

I can’t expect my students to innovate if I don’t do the same in my own teaching. Each semester, I try to push beyond my own knowledge and skills. It can be scary and disorienting. And occasionally a lesson plan will bomb, and I crash and burn in front of my students. When that happens, I do my best to model an appropriate response to failure. I acknowledge when things don’t go as planned. I articulate what I learned. I restart and try again.

9. Surround Yourself with Innovators

Since I no longer work in the day-to-day of a start-up news organization, I must continually find concrete ways to keep a forward-looking approach. In my research, I’ve studied experimentation in news organizations, entrepreneurial ventures, and how students embrace new technology. Also through organizations, conferences, local meet-ups, trainings, and online forums, I try to be a student of other journalism educators who are leading the way.

Mark Berkey-Gerard teaches digital reporting and data journalism courses at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. He was selected as a 2017 Tow-Knight Disruptive Journalism Educator.

The post 9 Practical Ways to Foster Innovation in a J-School Classroom appeared first on MediaShift.

I discovered content marketing in 2015. The media outlet I co-founded in 2011 in Ecuador, GK, was going through a crisis: We were having trouble selling advertising because some of our news coverage was controversial, and an initial investment we’d won was almost gone.

At about that time, the head of the communication department of an automobile brand called and asked: “Is there a way that I could have content on my site that’s as well written as the content on GK?”

GK.city website

The question was almost a challenge. After meeting with our future client, we found the answer to our problems: content marketing. At first, we were uncomfortable even saying the words; we were journalists first. But as we started thinking creatively, we realized how we could use our reporting and writing skills to do content marketing. Producing content for clients became the income source that allowed us to continue doing what we love the most: journalism.

Then, Janine Warner and Mijal Iastrebner told me about their plans to launch an online school this month as part of their non-profit dedicated to supporting Spanish-language digital media publishers in the U.S., Latin America and Spain. This part of SembraMedia was going to help entrepreneurial journalists build more sustainable businesses. I thought telling the story of our journey, by creating and teaching a content marketing class, would be a great way to contribute and show other journalists how content marketing could help them develop a new revenue source for their media outlets.

Breaking New Ground With Online, Spanish Focus

While I started preparing the class, I realized SembraMedia’s online education concept had a cooperative spirit and gave me the chance to share important skills and insights about entrepreneurial journalism, especially those that no one else has offered in Spanish.

SembraMedia’s Online School website

I knew one of the most important things I could share in the class was our story. I remembered how much GK’s founder, José María León, and I struggled years ago when we first started searching for new income sources, and how we went from writing four content marketing pieces per month to managing an entire digital content marketing agency with a team that includes a manager, a creative writer, a community manager, an illustrator and a designer.

To design my course, my first challenge was to sum up the steps it took to create an agency and transform it into a class. Telling part of the story of how it started was necessary, but I also wanted to include information about the tools we use, how we built the team and how we managed to keep GK on track while working at the agency.

Details Behind Distance Course Design

Writing the script for the class was not a problem. I’ve always worked as a reporter, writer or editor in print and digital media, so I enjoyed that part of the process.

The next part, however, was the real challenge: transforming my scripts into video lessons. I’ve never been a video person. In fact, I think I’m terrible in front of the camera. But to create the class, I got to use my own camera with no one else around.

I recorded myself over and over until I felt comfortable with the results. Then, I worked to make it better during the editing process. Finally, I created a list of links and activities students could to do after each video lesson to reinforce the lessons and give them a chance to put theory into practice.

These kinds of complementary materials are available in every SembraMedia class, and the practical exercises and resources help students apply what they learn to their own media businesses.

Gaining Professionally Through Building an Online Course

Creating courses for SembraMedia’s new online school was an enriching experience because it involved writing, recording, editing and seeking out simple, but extremely useful, tools such as CuePrompter. Ultimately, I realized the process of creating the class was a learning experience itself.

Isabela Ponce’s course website

Though I don’t think of myself as a great speaker, I really enjoyed sharing what I’d learned in my own business with other journalism entrepreneurs. When I give lectures or workshops, I always start with a premise in my mind: to be as generous as I can be. I do this because I want my students to learn something new and useful.

What Was Gained From Putting Entrepreneurial Journalism Online

In the end, I was happy with the result because I know how helpful this course would have been for me during my years in journalism school. Other instructors in the school have had similar experiences, including Fabiola Torres, one of the co-founders of Ojo Público, a Peruvian investigative journalism site. Torres is also an International Center for Journalists Fellow and SembraMedia’s ambassador in Peru.

“This school is necessary because as journalists we have not had the academic training in management or finances,” Torres shared with me via WhatsApp. “No one teaches us how to transform our ideas into a viable project. I think it is great to have this new online school where journalists can learn the kinds of skills we need to build successful media businesses.”

Fabiola and I share the experience of journalists throughout Latin America. Our journalism education never covered the business skills we now need to run our own digital media sites.

Although I’m enthusiastic about content marketing, I know it won’t work for all of the journalists who create independent media sites, yet with a variety of classes, journalists can find the revenue streams that allow them to practice journalism without compromising their integrity.

As the founder of an independent media site myself, I hope others can use my course or others to expand their understanding of entrepreneurial journalism, and that it’s not only about innovating and being creative 24/7 with your editorial projects. It’s about finding new ways of generating revenue so you can continue to publish for years to come.

Isabela Ponce Ycaza is the co-founder and editor of GK, a media outlet based in Ecuador that focuses on producing long-form journalism and providing context to complex narratives. The stories on the site include innovative narratives that range from video and podcasts to interactive card stacks and gaming apps. Prior to founding GK, Isabela worked for some of the largest traditional media organizations in Ecuador, including El Comercio, Revista Vistazo and El Telégrafo. She also serves as SembraMedia’s content director and ambassador in Ecuador.

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Chatbots are one such technology, with CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian among those launching experimental versions within Facebook Messenger.

The attractiveness of using messaging apps to get content to readers isn’t hard to work out: they offer the prospect of reaching a large number of people through popular platforms such as Messenger and WhatsApp, they have a high clickthrough rate, and they include less of the unpredictability associated with the algorithms that surface content on Facebook’s News Feed, Twitter and Instagram.

Then there’s the growing presence in our homes of voice-activated tools such as Amazon Echo. Becoming the news brand that we ask Alexa for has the potential to be a goal worth fighting over for newspapers, digital publishers and broadcasters alike.

Happily for journalism educators, free tools to help your students learn about how to create simple chatbots are at hand, so they can at least get a taste of the developing trend, as my students recently did during a standalone chatbot experience.

Preparing for Chatbot Exposure

For some recent sessions in a class I teach at the University of Huddersfield in the UK, I looked to a local chatbot maker, Flow XO, based at Padiham in Lancashire. (Read more on Flow XO here.)

The goal of the two-hour-long session wasn’t to get students to suddenly create the new market-leading product, but simply to play with the technology and have something they could show off to their friends at the end.

With students in the final year of their degree (we do three years here, not four) and in the midst of compulsory internships, I also wanted to offer them the opportunity to learn another cutting-edge skill they could take to their employers.

A student uses Flow XO to create a chatbot. (Photo: Richard Jones)

The students who pass through my classes tend to have little or no experience of coding (I anticipate this will change in the future), so in addition, it’s an opportunity to create something technical, without having to actually write a line of code.

Flow XO generally creates bots used by businesses to handle basic aspects of customer service. It’s in this field that some students had come across chatbots before, which meant at least a few members of the classes were slightly familiar with the concept.

Crafting the Chatbots

For the sessions, I prepared a help sheet in advance, guiding the students through setting up an account and adding some of the pre-set commands and responses that Flow XO allows in an off-the-shelf fashion. The only thing students needed to set up was a Facebook Page, as if for a business.

Many of the pre-sets within the software betray Flow XO’s wide range of clients, with templates including buying tickets and booking restaurant tables.

The “small talk” option is what students worked with mainly, as it allows them to develop responses to a range of possible queries. If you tell Flow XO to look for a certain keyword, you can tailor the response it will give when it sees it.

Challenges from Debugging to ‘Coding’

The debugging process was what took the most time. This was, in part, because Flow XO would occasionally serve an error message, but more often, it was because of a missing or misplaced piece of punctuation somewhere within the editing area. Even with no “proper” coding, working out where you’ve gone wrong can be frustrating.

A sample chatbot made using Flow XO. (Photo: Richard Jones)

I had relatively large classes for these sessions – 15 or so students in each, including some from various countries for whom English isn’t their first language – and this probably presented the biggest challenge. Spending even a couple of minutes helping one student find the small error in his or her work can mean neglecting the group as a whole. Even with a help sheet to work through, some students didn’t have the patience to go through everything with a keen eye and spot errors.

This last issue is probably a function of my instruction: I needed to make sure students were familiar enough with the concept, as well as the “why” behind it. I set it up as a fun, stand-alone session to learn a new skill, but if students can’t see how it would directly feed into an assessed piece or something like that, it can be tricky to keep everyone enthused and on task, even over a two-hour period.

The Beginning of Something New?

I imagine this will be easier in the future as chatbots become more commonplace. News companies have developed much more sophisticated versions, usually defaulting to a range of the day’s headlines before producing the latest content about any topic for which you care to enter a keyword.

Perhaps most notably, Quartz brings the conversational style of a messaging service to its bespoke app, and that’s probably the closest anyone has come to a genuinely satisfying journalism experience with this sort of technology.

I still wouldn’t call it anything like the “future of journalism,” and I’m not sure it’s yet worth devoting weeks of class time getting students to try to match Quartz or anyone else. There are technical skills which have a more obvious journalism utility in the short-term. But it’s well worth keeping an eye on how this mini-sector continues to develop.

Richard Jones is a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Huddersfield, where he mostly teaches online and social media skills to student journalists. Before becoming an academic, Richard worked as a journalist for a variety of British news organizations including Sky News and the BBC. He was a fellow at the 2017 Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute, held at the Cronkite School at ASU, and blogs at richardjonesjournalist.com.

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Awareness that data journalism is a serious and valuable part of contemporary journalism has well and truly dawned. There are — and hopefully always will be — inventive front-runners finding new ways to fulfill journalism’s time-honored mission, while also using the latest tools available. But, what has been slower is the induction of these trailblazers’ key ideas into the curriculum of everyday journalism education. And this is no small thing.

This was my dilemma in early 2016. My way forward was research. I wrote an academic paper that involved reviewing the literature and interviewing 35 other Australian journalism academics about what they were doing about the problem. What I learned, in brief, was that I was not alone, and there were tools and techniques that could help effectively bring data into journalism curricula.

Translating the Profession to Education

Like many journalism educators, I was initially employed by a university because I had worked as a journalist for many years and could bring real-world experiences into the classroom.  I’ve been doing this for a decade, and the fundamentals of journalism haven’t changed that much.

But data journalism presents a bundle of new challenges. I don’t have lived experience of being a data journalist to draw on, and neither do my colleagues. Data journalism is all-at-once the coolest, hardest and fastest changing kind of journalism there is, and that’s a hard thing to suddenly become competent enough in to stand up and teach. And yet that’s my job: to train people to be the journalists the future needs.

(Photo: Getty Images by MicrovOne)

In my research, participants agreed (almost unanimously) that up-skilling was an issue. Very few could access funding to bring in experts to teach students or support staff. Most were trying to cram their own up-skilling into their already overflowing workloads and puzzling over what specifically they should dedicate their limited up-skilling time to learning. Should it be Tableau, or more Excel, or coding or testing data scrapers, or data visualization tools?

The next ugliest problem was squeezing it into crammed curricula, already bursting at the seams because of pressure to produce graduates who can work on every platform.

Then, there are the students themselves. They have a mix of skill levels, which is tricky enough, but in this case, the mix is due largely to a fascinating phenomenon called “math aversion.” It’s a social curse and I, for one, would love to see it being tackled at its roots.

Diving Deep Into Math Aversion

In the paper, I cite researchers who have looked more deeply into it and have come to the conclusion that in some cultures, people are encouraged early on to think of themselves as “number people” or “word people,” and that this persists through life and leads to some having an actual aversion to numbers.

(Photo: Getty Images by NIpitphand)

My own data journalism course runs in the August-November semester, and in 2016 and 2017, I tackled this issue by making the first class about math aversion. We talked about it, confessed to having it and made a pact to deal with it as if we were in recovery mode, feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I took heed of what others in my study said, in comments like: “I map everything step-by-step, so they don’t get frightened,” and “We have to find workarounds like online percentage converters.”

It’s an approach that, according to the student feedback at the end of semester, is working, but it means that our exploration of the intricacies of cutting-edge data journalism is minimal for now. Yet, we are laying the groundwork, and by tackling the fears, we are setting people up for lifetimes of learning.

Blended Learning to Teach Data

Other helpful advice that emerged from the study was to be bold about blended learning. One of my respondents said she required students to complete Lynda.com’s Excel Five-Day Challenge before starting her course, and another said she encouraged students to use Lynda.com when they were stuck.

In my own course, I started offering a few points in return for a completion certificate from a Lynda.com Excel course of their choice. This was a good precursor to our other Excel-based activities, as it allowed those lacking the basics to get them, while students who knew the basics could build on their skills. While not all universities subscribe to Lynda.com, it’s a good resource for those that do, and there are many other similar resources available online.

An Expanding Notion of Data Journalism

The key insight that came from the literature review section of the study was that data journalism is clearly not just one thing. Drawing on the conclusions from a number of studies that looked at the kind of data journalism that was being practiced and published around the world, distinctions can be made between decorative data visualization; journalism demonstrating mature quantitative literacy; and the geekier hacking/coding end of things.

At the point of publication, these things can conflate, like when hacked data is presented in an infographic, but as skills for incorporation into a course, it can be useful to distinguish them.

My study found most of the data journalism being taught was at the visualization end, and very little of it was at the hacking/coding end. But as we enter 2018, I suspect that the space is moving fast and changing.

(Photo: Getty Images by Delices_89)

Data scraping software is proliferating, there’s now a Chrome extension and several apps available that make it possible to go to a website and pick elements you want to harvest into an Excel sheet. This can be done on campus in a single tutorial class, yielding some fresh data to sort and find stories in.

In another single class, pivot tables can be introduced and mastered, thanks to handy online tutorials. All that is required is the will, a staff member who has up-skilled enough to know how and a good data set.

In the meantime, my message to others interested in the progress of data journalism in the academy is that we are working on it. We are talking to each other and sharing success and failure stories, as well as teaching materials. There will be a special issue of Asia Pacific Media Educator on the topic coming out in June 2018. If you would like to contribute an article or commentary to it, please email me. The deadline is Feb. 16, 2018.

Kayt Davies is head of the journalism major at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. She has worked as a business journalist at The West Australian, on international news at Visnews (London), and edited community newspapers, magazines and online news services. Her PhD was an ethnographic study of women’s magazine editors. She has been awarded two Vice Chancellor’s citations for innovative teaching and an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Award, and Davies’ research interests include using journalism as an academic research methodology, the use of IHL to protect conflict reporters, and the pedagogical challenges presented by the rise of data journalism.

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