Big Projects and E-Learning at NewsU

I hate e-learning. I hated the one online class I took in college and I hated using the writing center’s e-learning system to help writers fix a comma, strengthen a thesis or improve a paper’s structure. But welcome to the adult world where e-learning fits so much better into the daily grind than going to a seminar. (I’d still rather learn in person, but that’s just me).

If you’re a journalist and don’t know about newsu.org, you should check it out. Run in conjunction with Poynter, the site offers webinars –many of which are FREE — to journalists on a variety of topics. Are you an education reporter? The Hechinger Institute offers a course on trends in education (In interest of full disclosure, I haven’t taken that one yet). The one that caught my eye today was online project development. I’m about to embark on a project at work that is undoubtedly going to take a lot of my time. But I think it is worth the time and effort and want the final project to be as close to flawless as it can be.

NewsU offers two courses from the Online News Association on how to plan and execute online projects. Beef up on how to plan for the web from the very early stages to actually putting the final product together. It even touches on how to market your product. The second course takes journalists through three projects by major news organizations and how they produced effective copy, photos and video to reach their readers. The first course got me thinking about what I need to do tomorrow when I go into work as far as sketching the project out with multimedia. The second one gave me a great idea for something the News Service (my place of employment) could do as a whole. If you get one story or content idea out of these webinars, aren’t they worth it? Plus, you have nothing to really lose because most of them are FREE.

So be a nerd, and go take a course on whichever journalism topic strikes your fancy!