Developing a NewsU Course: The FAQs Is NewsU interested in other courses? We are open to any course topic that helps journalists do a better job or helps them grow as professionals. Back to top What kinds of courses are we looking for? The content of NewsU courses will span the spectrum of journalism training needs: leadership and management; reporting, writing and editing; broadcast; online; ethics; and visual journalism. Topics range from writing better leads to understanding photographs as storytelling images to understanding how to cover specific issues such as water quality to how to manage your boss. Back to top What makes an effective NewsU course? Our courses are designed with busy journalists in mind. Most courses will be offered on a flexible schedule, requiring only one to two hours to complete, in order to make the most of participants’ valuable time. The content will be tightly focused and will actively involve participants. Many courses will allow participants to assess their skills as they go and specifically target their training needs. All of NewsU’s courses will offer the quality that is The Poynter Institute’s trademark. Back to top How much experience in Web site development should a course author have? For most courses, authors don’t need advanced technical skills. The NewsU course, "Crafting a Course: Developing E-learning for NewsU," will walk you through the basics of focusing content and applying the elements of effective interactive training. It is important that you have some basic understanding of how people learn, have expertise with your subject matter and have a simple Web-based graphical user interface to post content to the course’s Web site. Back to top What about those highly interactive modules that feature Flash? If you don’t know how to create courses using Flash, don’t worry. We can help. Our interactive learning producers will work with you to integrate the features that will provide the best learning experience for course participants. Interactive elements are very important to NewsU. We believe that most people learn by doing or by testing themselves and finding areas they want to improve upon. However, while interactions do not need to be complicated, they do need to be carefully thought out. Back to top Do you have an idea for a NewsU course? Here's how to get started. First, identify the goals and learning objectives for the course. Consider these questions: - Who is the audience for the course?
- What skill or value do you want them to learn?
- How will they learn? (What are the forms of content to be used?)
- To what degree will you interact with participants? What form will that take?
Next, try creating an outline of the course content, including some ideas for making the course interactive and using multimedia elements. The course, "Crafting a Course: Developing E-learning for NewsU," will help walk you through these steps. To access this course, you'll need to have a conversation with NewsU crew. Just give us a call or write.
For additional questions, contact Howard Finberg, faculty, interactive learning, at The Poynter Institute and project director of News University at hfinberg@poynter.org. You can also call the institute at 727.821.9494. Back to top
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