Poynter's NewsU Delivers What You Expect, Your Own Institution Perhaps Not

Abstract

No one doubts that the Poynter Institute is eminently qualified to be designing online courses, if anyone is. Indeed, some discussion about Poynter's NewsU programs has been along the lines of why a university would NOT want to partner with Poynter Institute when its faculty generally are more professionally qualified than many adjuncts are and might have journalistic credentials outshining anyone's in most JMC programs' full-time faculty. Poynter's faculty includes four administrators who have taught; fifteen regular faculty; five adjunct faculty; six affiliate faculty; ten fellows and other professionals (including persons such as Missouri professor Jacqui Banaszynski); and various visiting faculty members at any given point. Board of Trustees and National Advisory Board also include a few current or former j-school deans and professors. experienced Poynter Institute has developed more than seventy self-directed education modules, the most popular of which, in order, are: Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More; The Be a Reporter Game; The Interview; The Lead Lab; Sense: Building Blocks of News; Language of the Image; The Writer's Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use; Get Me Rewrite: Craft of Revision; Five Steps to Multimedia and Math for Journalists: Help with Numbers. (Fortunately, Typography for News Design is the fourteenth-most-popular so perhaps Americans will finally see fewer ugly publications and websites!) Second, online education is something of a big question mark in terms of effectiveness. For every study that says that online education is as effective, or more effective, than in-classroom delivery, there's another one that says otherwise. Let's for the moment assume that either the evidence is inconclusive, or at least that online courses' effectiveness vary by course type, course level, subject matter, and/or design of specific instances of in-classroom and online versions. (Poynter brags that, across seventeen quarterly evaluations, 61% of users were helpful to extremely helpful in getting better on the job/in class, while 72% said would recommend NewsU to colleague. I don't know about you, but I don't find that 61% figure to be very impressive about a free, self-directed program, and while 82% of users said they are likely to take another module, only 47% actually have taken two or more.) Third, in case you missed the AEJMC convention session (August 11, 2011) by Howard Finberg, Poynter Institute; Mark Biggs, Missouri State University; Susan Reilly, Florida Atlantic University; and Tony Fellow, California State UniversityFullerton, allow me to summarize it and thus what JlOl is all about. Finberg has said that the background in launching JlOl was leverage self-directed modules while adding online group seminars and a Webinar experience; to with schools; and execute JlOl keeping in mind that it intersects with [the interests of the] Carnegie Corp., which gave the Poynter Institute a pilot program grant to fund JlOl with a few schools. Finberg also stated three JlOl goals: unique educational experience via leveraging the expertise of Poynter, closer relationships with [and] building upon our successful e-learning modules; work more closely with universities, and create lifelong learners, including to increase the understanding of the role of journalism no matter what students choose as their profession. Hence, Poynter is savily working on the correct assumption that not all JMC majors pursue a career in the JMC professions/industries, let alone itself, and is implying that JlOl-like courses may play a role in a larger media literacy mission for universities. standard syllabus as outlined by Finberg consists of Week 1: Introduction; Week 2: What is News?; Week 3: Intro to Reporting; Week 4: Interviewing; Week 5: Story Forms & Shapes; Week 6: Alternative Story Forms; Week 7: Dealing with Diversity; Week 8: Reporting & Writing; Week 9: Introduction to Style; Week 10: Rewriting Yourself; Week 11: Libel, Slander, Privacy; Week 12: News-Gathering Legality (though for CaI State-Fullerton, Week 12 was devoted to Press Releases Info, presumably because students were getting media law in another course, perhaps simultaneously); Week 13: Ethical Decision Making: Week 14: Multimedia Storytelling; Week 15: Business of Journalism; and Week 16: Wrap Up/What's Next. …