Lesson learned: Pedagogical insights gained from the MOOC, Making Sense of the News

Abstract

This paper explores the pedagogical approach of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on news literacy as a case study. The six-week MOOC on Coursera, Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens, was launched on January 9, 2017, jointly by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong and the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University. The course is being offered to students worldwide on a rolling basis throughout the year; as of June 25, 2017, more than 5,700 people around the world have registered for the course and about two-thirds of them have actively engaged with the course materials. The preliminary evaluation of the course presented in this paper discusses the process to create content for a global audience. It includes a summary of the observed strengths and weaknesses of the learning materials and online teaching and learning platform, drawing on the analysis of the curriculum development, instructional design and technological architecture as well as the content of online forum discussions. The quantitative side of the research delves into students’ demographic data as well as the entrance and exit survey results. These findings are believed to inform future directions of internet-based news literacy education in today’s technologically interconnected societies. In the concluding section the paper discusses how other educators could contribute to the future development of the online course and suggests ways for them to create a specialized pedagogical model based on the MOOC for news consumers in countries with different access to information.