This is a piece that ran in the November 2007 issue of AEJMC News, built around testimonials the News University team collected from NewsU users at AEJMC’s 2007 conference. The idea was simple: rather than tell journalism educators that e-learning worked, let their peers say it.
The examples range from filling classroom gaps to sharpening the instructors’ own skills. A few that stood out:
“What I’m sensing is that they [students] want to engage with the content. That’s what makes NewsU so effective. They can be involved with it. They can interact with the content as opposed to sitting back and reading it.” —Charlotte-Anne, Assistant Professor, Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, University of Nevada
“The NewsU module in color use and color theory has demystified this difficult to manage and often abused aspect of design. My students revel about the application of “simultaneous contrast” and other concepts that are often left unexplained in many key texts.” —Lulu Rodriguez, Associate Professor, Iowa State University
“I am, without a doubt, a 25 to 30 percent better teacher because of NewsU. In teaching about everything from Web journalism to news writing to contemporary mass media, NewsU’s lessons and examples are absolutely essential.” —Richard Craig, Associate Professor, San Jose State University
One comment came from Jun Oguro, an associate professor at Ryukoku University in Japan, who noted that “In Japan there are FEW journalism schools for many reasons,” and that he was using News University’s programs to teach writing and editing.
The sidebar captures where NewsU stood at that point:
News University (www.newsu.org) is the e-learning home for [more] than 51,000 journalists, educators and students in 157 countries around the world. NewsU offers more than 50 focused, interactive courses that appeal to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media. Many courses take just an hour or two to complete and most are free. NewsU is a project of The Poynter Institute funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Fifty courses and 51,000 registered users was a milestone worth bragging about in 2007. By the time I left Poynter, both numbers had grown well beyond that. What strikes me reading this now, nearly two decades later, is how much of the skepticism we were answering — can online learning really teach anything? — has simply evaporated. That argument was settled by circumstance, not persuasion.