Sorting fact from fiction, news from promotion, and fact-based opinion from emotional assertion is the goal of a groundbreaking massive open online course (MOOC) offered by the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism.
Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens is produced by the Center for News Literacy and its partner, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) at the University of Hong Kong. Hosted on the online learning platform Coursera, the course will help students develop the critical thinking skills needed to judge the reliability of information regardless of where they find it — on social media, the internet, TV, radio or newspapers.
The Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism has been working on the challenge of finding reliable information in a flood of fake news, propaganda and advertising for almost a decade. The online course is a version of the center’s news literacy curriculum that more than 15,000 university students and media educators in 10 countries have taken over the last decade.
The six-week course will be open to students of all ages and will feature 3-5 minute videos on key news literacy concepts (with subtitles in English, Chinese and Spanish) presented by the JMSC’s Anne Kruger and Stony Brook’s Steven Reiner.
Each week will tackle a challenge unique to the digital era, including where to find trustworthy information, how to tell what’s fair and what’s biased, and meeting the challenges of digital citizenship.
The course will begin on January 9, 2017 and is now open for registration.
To learn more, visit the course information page or the Center for News Literacy website.
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