Abstract

Online journalism educators are confronted with difficult questions as the news landscape changes rapidly. They must decide whether they should teach emerging narrative forms such as blogging and podcasting, how heavily they should pursue multimedia presentations and to what extent they should involve audiences in the production of news. In addition, many educators must resolve an underlying tension between teaching journalism and teaching the skills that support production of these new forms of storytelling.

This project was an attempt to create a snapshot of practices to better help educators serve their students.

I surveyed online journalism educators at colleges and universities in Canada in an attempt to find out what they were teaching, how they were teaching it and what learner outcomes they were hoping for. I used grounded theory -- a methodology for developing theory through an overlapping process of data collection, note taking, coding, sampling and comparison, not unlike the process of journalistic inquiry -- to interpret the data.

I found that some educators were unleashing teaching potential and reducing the burden of skills instruction by investing heavily in collaborative content production technology. This effort equipped them to better teach emerging narrative forms and lessened the burden of skills instruction. As well, it improved student learning by prompting the educators to forgo assignments involving independent website projects in favour of ones that encouraged students to work together in the production of news.