Discussion

The research question addressed in this survey had three components to it. Answers to two of them -- the contents of the educators' instruction and the learner outcomes they hoped for -- were factual, requiring a summary of the results of open coding the interview transcripts.

However, more in-depth coding and analysis was required to reveal answers to the final component of the research question -- the nature of the instruction. At an early stage in the research, it became clear that educators were identifying a common dilemma that ran as an undercurrent to their teaching. Selective coding of the interviews highlighted it further.

The participants said that prompting students to leverage the characteristics of the medium usually meant requiring them to assume ever-greater technical burdens. In short, the further students moved away from replicating the content of a newspaper online, the more technology they had to assimilate. This was a clear challenge to most of the educators. All of them said they spent 50% or less of their time teaching production skills. But a majority commented that they spent considerably more time on this aspect than they wanted to. Educators' near-unanimous assertion that their course aim was to teach journalistic skills, not technical ones highlighted this issue further.

What are they teaching?

Participants expressed a broad consensus as to the basics of a standard online journalism curriculum -- elements including web writing, research and design. The vast majority subscribed enthusiastically to the scannable text model proposed by Jakob Nielsen and others. As well, many incorporated instruction in website navigation as means of increasing students' understanding of how users use online content.

Beyond that, some participants are incorporating so-called Web 2.0 tools in an effort to increase interactivity and explain complex issues better to news consumers. Other instructors too commented that they intended to expose students to these tools next year.

About a third of educators concentrated on podcasting, meta-content and collaborative blogs. And even though the instructors reported mixed results with some exercises, they were encouraged by their potential for collaboration and creativity.

Other educators, even if they weren't able to incorporate interactive tools, were thinking about them, as exemplified by one instructor's belief in the importance of non-linear storytelling.

As well, a majority was instructing students in the use of multimedia elements, despite mixed evidence of its usefulness to online news consumers in the research literature.

Concerning technical instruction, there was a general consensus among educators that Hypertext Markup Language is no longer a core skill that journalists need to possess. Most of the participants said students needed familiarity with its basic structure -- but that was all.

The main reason, they cited, was that web publishing software was getting easier to use.

Still, despite a desire to incorporate new approaches, there was recognition that students still needed practice in core journalistic techniques of research, writing, reporting and editing, and that their courses needed to support those skills as much as possible.

What learner outcomes are they hoping for?

The participants were roughly split as to whether they were preparing students for specific jobs in the workplace. Those who said they were tended to focus on skills more acutely. But many of the educators said their goal was to graduate students with the know-how to consider broad questions of engagement with news consumers -- not solve specific technical issues. At least half said key attributes for positions in online newsrooms were creativity or innovation.

A number of educators said having students understand the importance of interactivity was also a major course aim. Some asked students to simulate, or in a couple of cases, implement, polls and discussion forums in their work as a means of interacting with their audience.

But one university educator (Instructor 6) cautioned his students, saying they would mislead their audience if they encouraged them to interact, and then abandoned them at the end of the course:

I say I can't really have you doing too much interactive stuff because you're going to disappoint people. It's unfair to the user. If people do come to the site, they are going to wonder why you're not answering their e-mails, why you are not on the message boards ... It is a fiction and I know it's wrong, but I don't know how to solve that.

Clearly, the issue of educating students in the importance of interactivity was challenging to many educators.

Participants also clearly had concerns about where their students were going to practise the skills and approaches they were learning in their programs. About half said they were preparing their students for jobs in the workplace, but most of those said that "job" may, in fact, be more of a task or a contract appointment than a full-time position.

How are they teaching it?

The two most important questions in the survey prompted participants to name their most effective teaching tools and to identify the challenges they faced in teaching their curriculum. The aim was for participants to evaluate the best parts of their curriculum and to assess the areas in which they struggle.

Open and selective coding of their responses revealed two clear themes.

The first was that faculty members who pursued the most innovative curriculums were the ones least challenged by technology. I define innovative approaches as being ones that reflect practices the recent literature identifies as important to the delivery of online news. As well, innovative teaching prompts students to produce content furthest in nature from a newspaper replicated online. The instructors most active in pursuing community interaction, blogs and syndicated content for mobile devices, for example, either had use of sophisticated collaborative publishing software that greatly lessened the burden of teaching skills. Or they had adequate technical assistance to relinquish teaching the mechanics of the technology. In many cases, they had both.

Indeed, the two educators using the most powerful publishing tools were the two most adamant that they not focus on skills instruction. As well, they were the two who identified themselves most strongly as not being technically savvy.

Controlling technology was a central theme among almost all of the participants. Many observed that they spent time with technology that they wished they could have spent teaching journalism. As well, many said they saw a significant portion of their students struggle with it but they didn't have adequate time to assist them. Not having enough time, of course, is a common complaint among educators. But a number of participants commented that they faced two unique challenges: having to incorporate a broad range of skills -- such as text, image, audio and video editing -- in a single course and also having to keep current in an emerging field that changes almost daily.

The second theme of the participants' responses was that their most effective teaching exercises stressed group learning. Roughly half of the study participants said the most effective exercises were group assignments. Many said they paid almost no attention to individual website creation, opting instead to have the students produce stories in small groups.

Some educators, however, indicated they conducted their most effective teaching assignments away from the computer, saying other environments were at least as useful in sparking creativity and discussion. Indeed, the one educator most focused on community interaction had his students go out and get an audience by personally meeting with them, phoning them and surveying them, using traditional means at times, in order to engage them before launching the students' site.

Still, the most innovative educators involved both themes in their instruction. These educators seemingly managed to unleash teaching potential and lessen their burden by investing heavily in collaborative technology.

Five of 13 educators said they used a collaborative publishing tool for storing and publishing student work. The divide between educators who had adopted one, and those who hadn't, was, perhaps, illustrated best by the comments of one college educator (Instructor 10):

I'd love a content management system but that's the same thing CBC wants and it's costing them a million bucks to build. How do I stay up to speed on such a limited education budget?

Of course, even a good content management system can't solve all the challenges of teaching production skills -- especially multimedia creation -- an assertion made by at least one participant. But the use of such a collaborative publishing system, or not, was clearly an important factor in determining how instructors taught their course. The educators split roughly evenly between those who had students present their journalism as individual website projects, often with the students simulating interactive content, and those who used content management software to create collaborative news sites with interactive elements.

Implications

The profound changes affecting the news industry are evident in the results of this study. As online journalism educators we are taking solid steps in preparing students for more interactive models of news in the future. But the pace of change is mounting considerable challenges to those efforts.

There now seems little doubt that communities of readers online will exert much more influence over the delivery and content of news in the future. The Globe and Mail hosts regular online chats with reporters. The Toronto Star encourages readers to bookmark and share descriptions of its stories on the site del.icio.us. Big Media is already investing heavily in social networks: Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation purchased upstart online community MySpace.com for $580 million US in 2005 to drive traffic to Fox TV sites. While the implications for journalism are not clear, the move points strongly to a future in which audiences play a more influential role than they do now. The move in this direction is not linear. Participatory journalism advocate Dan Gillmor issued a humble assessment of the shortcomings of his San Francisco-area venture Bayosphere.com in January (Gillmor, 2006). But for every failed experiment in citizen journalism this year there were many more upstarts trying to find the key to collaborative newsgathering.

So what does this mean for us as journalism educators preparing students for this environment?

First, we have to find better ways of engaging the audiences for student work. Many participants in this study acknowledged that even though students published their stories online, the primary audience for them was the instructor. They considered it a bonus if interview subjects commented on a published story via e-mail or other web surfers stumbled on the stories and posted feedback. Instructors can discuss the importance of online news communities in class, but this level of actual interactivity is likely inadequate for effective teaching. The university instructor who acknowledged the interactivity on the student site as largely "a fiction," simply stated clearly what others alluded to.

Interactivity is, and will increasingly be, the hallmark of online journalism. Having a legitimate and loyal audience for student stories is probably the only way we can teach students some of the skills they will need in online newsrooms of the future. As Grier (2006) states:

"As more newspapers use the Web to engage with readers, rather than treating the medium as just another publishing platform, their reporters will need to learn the skills necessary for interacting with the public (para. 1) ... Newspapers cannot expect reporters to be able to immediately intuit a form of conversational media where the manner of interaction appear to run counter to the ethics journalists must uphold in their reporting" (para. 17)

These skills include dealing with complaints about their journalism and involving audiences in the development of stories -- from generating ideas to finding sources to (in some cases, even) reviewing a draft.

Attracting and holding an online community is, of course, a difficult job. Who on staff would take responsibility for this initiative? How realistic would it be when academic courses end a few weeks after they start and site content quickly becomes stagnant? The answers are not easy and they pose profound challenges to the level of technical and administrative support in journalism schools and the overall structure of curriculums.

One possible option is creating a website portal for student work (authored originally for online or not) with content fed into it regularly from different courses throughout the year. One journalism school is already planning to experiment with this in the coming year. Another option is working with a local media outlet to feature student stories and drive readers to the student publication.

At the very least, we should strive to provide opportunities for audiences to comment -- ideally publicly -- on every story published online so students can appreciate issues of engaging an audience.

A second implication of the changing news environment is that our journalism schools will have to integrate online journalism more broadly across the academic curriculum. Many participants in the study indicated that their course was an elective. This study didn't attempt to find out the extent to which instructors in other courses addressed issues of online journalism. But comments from participants suggested that discussion of important issues such as ethical behaviour in chat rooms and verification of online sources -- as well as introductions to emerging news delivery technologies such as syndicated headline (RSS) feeds -- occurred mainly in their courses.

The implication was that students taking other electives likely missed out on discussions of important issues such as who can call themselves a journalist in the age of easy self-publishing. The particular issue is important in light of comments from many educators in the survey who said they expected few graduates to get full-time work in online journalism. Thus the new journalists were likely to be primarily "old" media workers who pick up side projects in new media. Most students, educators said, would drift in and out of web work -- and indeed journalism itself -- as a freelancer, a contract worker project assistant, or even blogger.

The suggestion, then, was that many graduates might not define themselves as journalists but might act journalistically at points in their careers. So how are we preparing students for this type of role? We might want to restructure our curriculums to discuss such issues more aggressively early in our programs. As well, we might want to consider integrating advanced-level online journalism education with other media streams later in the program to minimize the increasingly fuzzy distinction between online journalism and traditional media.

A third implication of the new media landscape is that our journalism departments need to provide better support for our teaching practices in order to help us stay relevant to young students.

Prensky (2001) argues that many educators today are failing students because they use outdated teaching methods that don't reflect the way young people learn in the digital age. He says the so-called "digital natives" today respond best to learning environments that simulate online games. They crave learning in multi-task environments, want graphical representations of subject matter, thrive on instant gratification and enjoy networked, random access environments. In short, he states:

The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language (para. 9).

A number of the educators in this study acknowledged that many students have their own blogs and participate daily on social networking sites. This has certainly been my experience. The students thrive in this environment even if they don't possess the conceptual frameworks to understand it. Most educators, including myself, however, don't participate online to anywhere near the same extent.

Prensky's comments raise the issue of whether tenured online journalism instructors, many in their 40s and 50s, and acculturated in a era of non-interactive journalism, can truly thrive as educators on their own. Sure, we are experts in the literature and we maintain professional ties to the industry. But whether we can effectively teach interactivity to students who use it as second nature and adapt with ease is an important question.

Nonetheless, it points to a need for educators to constantly upgrade their teaching methods and for administrators to support them in it. Attending teaching workshops, education retreats and educators' conferences may be more important in online journalism education, which is driven uniquely by technological culture.

Finally, on a personal level, I was heartened by the comments of other instructors who said they felt their courses operated at the periphery of the program's curriculum. While administrators and colleagues supported their work, some didn't understand it entirely and didn't see the importance of moving aggressively to integrate online issues into the broader curriculum. Clearly we still need to push online journalism education into the mainstream.

Similarly, I was encouraged by the number of participants who pointed out that the community of practice in online journalism is not as strong as those that exist in traditional media streams. Perhaps this is because many educators are hired as sessional instructors. But nonetheless, many participants expressed hope that we can strengthen it.

Lastly, I was fascinated by the innovative teaching practices occurring across the country. Few educators were using textbooks -- most had developed unique and exciting curriculums to engage students. A few had truly visionary ideas for the future. It was humbling to consider them colleagues.

Directions for further research

This study asked educators how they were preparing prospective journalists for the online news environment. Many instructors had strong opinions as to how journalists should author content for news consumers. But an obvious avenue for further research is to find out how working journalists are creating content for their audiences. Research on this topic is either incomplete or out of date. Most news organizations keep extensive data on the behaviour of their audience -- what they consume, where they find stories on the site and how they react to those stories. So what skills do employers need in their newsrooms? And what do they expect from new employees? Are these skills the same ones educators are offering? Are skills gained from blogging really transferable to actual newsroom tasks? Do stories authored in non-linear chunks result in any measurable increase in satisfaction for daily readers of online news? How do site statistics (concerning most-read stories, for example) drive the newsroom agenda for reporting?

At the very least such research could shed light on the discrepancy between many employers' stated preference for critical thinkers and the extensive technical skill set these same employers request in their job ads.

Another subject for further research is the application of emerging technologies. One of the conclusions of this project was that educators were beginning to assign importance to so-called Web 2.0 tools. This catch-all phrase for emerging web technologies refers broadly to applications that "mash" data together or support collaboration. Some participants in the study suggested students could use these tools to map their some of their findings geographically. The students could also tag (describe) their completed stories so readers could more easily interpret specific elements.

However, this is such a new field that there is likely no research into journalistic applications of these tools. There are, however, many questions. How useful are such maps to online audiences? Is tagging a good use of a reporter's time? What characterizes stories that use these tools effectively? How would a newsroom go about compiling such presentations on a regular basis?

Finally, a third research project suggested by this study is to track how graduates actually make their way into the industry. The existing data is largely anecdotal. Graduates' actual work experiences could have considerable implications for the kind of education they require. A number of participants in the study said few students actually got online jobs with established media outlets; most began by participating in small online projects initiated by print or broadcast information providers. So, the skills online media workers use after graduation may not be those Big Media deems most important. Indeed, the most influential bloggers and podcasters are perhaps most likely to work independently or in small groups that operate under a looser definition of journalism.