Findings

Data set and considerations

This survey involved 13 instructors at 12 Canadian colleges and universities.

There are, in fact, 38 institutions offering journalism programs in Canada -- 29 institutions offering diploma programs listed by the Association of Canadian Community Colleges and the nine universities offering degree programs recognized by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. Two are French-language programs, which fell outside the scope of this study. Of the remaining 36 institutions, 18 did not offer a course in online journalism. One offered a seminar in new media issues, but this course too fell outside the scope of the study. Another institution was in the process of implementing a course for 2006-07 but did not offer it in 2005-06.

At the remaining 16 colleges and universities, three instructors either did not respond to requests to participate or were unavailable to participate within the timeframe of this study.

With the 12 institutions that participated, it's important to note that the online journalism courses, the programs they are part of, and the institutions themselves are quite different. Consequently this diversity poses a challenge to comparing them directly.

One obvious issue is the inclusion of both colleges and universities in the study. According a definition provided on the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada website (2006), undergraduate degree programs "require three or four years of full-time study" and may offer an honours degree involving "a higher level of concentration and achievement within the honours subject" (para. 1). Community colleges offering diplomas tend to offer one and two-year programs and, according to the Association of Canadian Community Colleges website (2006), "share the primary functions of responding to the training needs of business, industry [and] the public service sectors" (para. 3). Logically then, instructors' teaching aims are likely to be coloured by the role of the institution.

While this study did find that college instructors tended to emphasize job training and university teachers stressed the broader role of the journalist in society, this distinction wasn't at all clear-cut. One of the instructors most focused on journalists' role in their community -- and least focused on teaching technical skills -- taught at a college. Conversely, one university course was among the most focused on website creation skills.

Similarly, a crucial distinction between institutions is their online journalism offerings were not all part of undergraduate programs. The study included three universities whose instructors taught the course within a master's program. Clearly this meant these instructors aimed to meet a higher academic standard than the others. However, the general aim of the student work -- journalism presented in an online form -- was comparable to the other institutions.

Another consideration is the varying sizes of the institutions and their scope. Some of the universities have more than 200 students enrolled in their journalism programs and appeal to students with aspirations to work in Canada's national online newsrooms. By contrast some of the college programs are strictly regional in their appeal with as few as 10 students enrolled at a time. An instructor at one program, for example said he prepared students to lead the web operations of small community newspapers, while also helping produce the print product.

Finally, the existence of complementary programs at larger institutions frequently meant an instructor had greater teaching resources than others. For example, two instructors benefited from the assistance of staff and faculty in a graphic arts program at the same institution. These instructors said they had more time to focus on journalistic matters, having expert help with the technical aspects.

Courses and the instructors

Of the 12 institutions that participated in this study, nine offered a single course in online journalism. The remaining three institutions offered at least two courses. Two institutions concentrated heavily on online journalism, offering it as either the sole component of their program or as a stream of courses within it.

The courses typically had names such as Online Journalism, Introduction to Online Journalism, Online Writing and Introduction to New Media. In every case the institution offered the course over a single term or semester, although courses at three institutions led into a second single-term course.

All of the 13 instructors were at different institutions except for two, which taught different online journalism courses at the same university. All of the other instructors were the sole online journalism teacher at their institution.

Ten instructors were either full-time faculty or a contract equivalent. Three were part-time instructors.

Most taught between nine and 20 students in their online journalism course. But three typically had between 30 and 50 students.

Seven institutions offered the course to students as an elective. The other five required their students to enroll.

All of the courses had a lecture or seminar component in addition to substantial lab time. Most instructors pegged the practical component at 50-70% of available class time.

Course content

Many of the educators taught an elective course that introduced students to the topic midway through their program of study. Others taught their course as a senior-level production workshop that functioned like a working newsroom. Still, the instructors stressed common themes in describing the content of their courses. They frequently mentioned topics in the following list, although no single person addressed them all. Core elements of their curriculums included:

  • understanding the nature of the medium
  • writing for the web
  • constructing pages using Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets
  • using software for webpage creation, image editing and uploading
  • grasping the fundamentals of website design
  • gaining familiarity with emerging narrative structures such as blogging and podcasting
  • comprehending technologies such as headline syndication (RSS) and content sharing (tagging)
  • experimenting with non-linear story forms, including multimedia
  • discussing current issues in journalism and society
  • debating ethical issues

All of the educators said they didn't teach core journalistic skills in the course but expected students to reinforce the skills they acquired in other courses.

Three educators described their courses as following a "print plus" model, in which students take content prepared for print and adapt it for use on the web using basic interactive elements and a format pleasing to web readers. "The trick is to get them thinking beyond journalism as writing for a newspaper," Instructor 4 said.

Instructor 12 described her aim this way:

What I try to do with students is to teach them to think about more bang-for-your-buck kind of news coverage. We teach them that all stories -- no matter format they are initially found on -- can be transferred and posted on a website in a far more interesting manner. So they add links, they add sidebar stories, they add a photo gallery if it lends itself to that. [And then at an advanced stage, perhaps stream some video].

Educators' typical objectives were getting students to write a short, punchy narrative with a hard news lead and formatting that attracts readers with short attention spans. Instructor 10 made her first assignment an online rewrite from a published newspaper story:

I'm looking for bold subheads, a proper headline for the story that can speak to an audience that is not [local]. And at least some external links -- not to other news sites but to relevant websites that are not their homepages. So that's the first thing to put into practice: writing basics, breaking up the text. It's a short, simple story, about 350-400 words -- adapt it for the web.

Three educators asked their students to critique a website in terms of how the authors presented the information. They said critiquing aspects such as user navigation was important in helping students understand the concerns of online readers.

"I get them to go to cnn.com and I ask, 'Where does this site break down?'" said Instructor 10. "At what point don't you don't know where you are?"

Three other instructors asked their students to create a subject-specific website -- or zine. This was a website, created either independently or in collaboration with others, that involved original reporting and served as a means of testing students' assimilation of course objectives, including online writing and design.

Many of these educators structured their assignments to assess students' grasp of course goals in sequence. Other educators opted to offer concentrated technical instruction at the beginning of the course and then to have students undertake similar reporting assignments each week. The goal was to structure their course as a working newsroom.

"We treat it as a professional workshop," said Instructor 8. "We're kind of beyond instructional stuff and beyond class assignment stuff. We treat it as, 'We're now providing you with an opportunity to produce professional work and publish it for the world to see.'"

This same instructor said her curriculum borrowed heavily from the broadcast model. She said much of the student work was still text-based, but she required them to augment their stories with multimedia content such as interactive maps, audio slideshows and timelines. As well, she taught them they should phrase the text itself like a radio or television script.

You have to understand that people are going to read the material and pay attention to grammar and style and capitalization and all the things that broadcasters don't care about in their scripts. But the writing has to be much more like broadcast writing than print writing. People really scan and glance and get impressions from layout and visual presentation and all that stuff as opposed to words on the page or on the screen.

Another faculty member said one of her primary goals was for students to consider ways to package stories using a diverse range of media. In particular, she said she wanted students to think about the medium they can use to tell the story most effectively.

[I] push them to think in terms of the needs of the story and being creative about pursuing 'let's throw a raw audio clip in here of the interview' or 'what this story really, really needs is an interactive map.' I mean that kind of lateral thinking across media is probably the most important thing. (Instructor 13)

Two college instructors, as well, stressed the importance of producing multimedia journalism. "The one thing we stress to them about the web world is that it requires a multi-dimensional approach to how they cover a story," said Instructor 12. Another made the final assignment for his course a multimedia project that prompted students to produce either an interactive audio slideshow or piece of video.

One university professor structured his course so that students gained experience in developing journalism for mobile devices. His instruction focused mainly on podcasting this year but he ultimately hoped it would include creating content for mobile devices such as cellphones and personal digital assistants.

He required his students write short reports for text-based devices -- just web browsers at this stage -- and also to author an associated podcast that explored the same story in an audio environment. The goal, he said, was for his reporters to take cues from the sports and entertainment industries in an effort to capture the attention of young people:

I ride the bus to school and I see all the students. And I would say roughly 80% of them have headphones on -- so the question becomes how do you get inside their head? Entertainment media producers, largely in the United States, are specifically creating programs for the iPod. It's a small little screen, there are small earbuds and they're developing new storytelling motifs and styles -- narrative structures that are appropriate. And it seems the news business ignores this at its peril. (Instructor 5)

A college instructor too placed heavy emphasis on preparing students for society's broad adoption of web-enabled mobile devices. For her though, the most important skill students could learn was non-linear storytelling -- segmenting stories into logically arranged, multi-level narratives that users could consume on small screens. She says it's critical that students understand storytelling in the digital age is like designing a museum exhibit that patrons enter from different galleries.

On an abstract level, I'm trying to get them to understand that as a storyteller, instead of us having one path up the mountain -- that's what the newspaper, or the TV or the radio is -- there are many paths up the mountain. And you have to learn how to write story that provides each of those pathways up. So a person can come in at your story at different angles. That's what the Internet really represents. (Instructor 10)

Two educators saw blogging as an effective means for students to digest the course content and form their own opinions. As well, they saw it as a way for students to experiment with interactivity, without requiring a lot of technical skill. The two instructors set up course blogs so that students could comment on the issues covered by the course. One professor didn't post comments himself at all. The other, regularly prompted students to consider the themes he was raising:

Ideally I wanted them to react to what I was writing; it was part technical and part theoretical in terms of what I thought this means for journalism. And to get them to respond to that. And the other part was I was hoping they would contribute interesting things they had found; ideas they had about what this meant for journalism. (Instructor 7)

Neither instructor made blog participation a requirement of the course. Instructor 6 simply hoped the experience would be addition to their skill set that some employer would find appealing: "So they can say to an employer, yeah, I'm familiar with blogs, I've been blogging for half a year now."

Course aims

Most instructors described the aim of their course as generally requiring students to grasp the fundamentals of the medium and apply core skills to produce journalism with an element of interactivity. Two college instructors gave summations that were typical of many. Instructor 9 said:

The aim of the course is to equip students to go into the workforce with an understanding of this new medium, to be current on the latest developments and to have at least the basic skills to function in this new medium.

Another, Instructor 12, said:

We want them to graduate with a complete understanding of how you would write for a website, how you would approach packaging for a website, how you would make something interesting to a user, and to be completely familiar with the terminologies and the technologies and how they affect media. And also teach them to think a little bit out of the box.

Three educators stressed the importance of grasping website design as a means of recognizing how people consume online content. Two college instructors said understanding how users navigate a site was crucial, with Instructor 10 arguing:

They have to learn the basics of web design and good navigation. Journalistically if you have the best story in the world and you don't have a good website that you can easily use, it's lost.

The other (Instructor 3) concurred, saying it was important to "focus on user-centred design and understanding your user population when you are creating content online." But he used the navigation issue as a springboard to assert that a crucial goal of an online course should be to help students understand online communities so they can help an employer build theirs:

The primary thing is that it's all about conversation and community. One of the problems they are going to run into if they actually get work at a television station or radio station or newspaper is that most mainstream media don't know how to use the web effectively ... They are not really that interested in engendering conversation. They are more interested in highlighting the show that is coming up tomorrow.

Two university professors described the aim of their course as ultimately being similar to those in other courses. They said their emphasis was on storytelling and core journalistic practices, with Instructor 13 asserting plainly:

We want to graduate good journalists ... The online wrinkle is that they should have the facility to work in a converged atmosphere and to be able to handle the slightly different requirements imposed by things like breaking news.

One university professor (Instructor 1) said her main goal was to free some creativity in students and grasp the idea of openness and innovation on the web. However, the technical aspect of authoring a page was a key part of that. For some students, she said, the simple act of creating a personal webpage represented a quiet triumph over technology. She said the fear some students possessed about web technologies was a mental barrier that often blocked other learning:

Even though this is the generation that is supposed to be comfortable with technology, a lot of them are actually very afraid of it. When you see something online it looks so impossible and out of reach. To show them you can self-publish; there is something quite empowering about that.

Criteria for student excellence

In describing their criteria for student excellence, all of the educators said a starting point for their evaluation of a student story was good journalism. Factors they said were crucial for a successful story included: solid research, appropriate interview subjects, lively writing, accuracy, spelling, grammar and application of style.

Beyond that, one university educator (Instructor 6) gives an extensive list:

If the stories come up to a good minimum level, then I look at what they've done online. Have they absorbed the lessons of the class? Have they put some thought into functioning as a team? Have they effectively laid out their stories? Have they modified their writing to accommodate the demands of online? In other words, for example, are their initial story blurbs below the headline on the homepage compelling? Are they information packed? Do they make sense? Or have they broken all rules I've told them about -- you know, is it filled with a stupid pun that no one can figure out? Do they use links well? Have they figured out that hyper-linking between stories is important? Have they done that willy-nilly or have they organized themselves well? In other words, have they utilized all of the potential of the web in their stories? The third category is the 'what else?' Maybe someone has done a photo gallery or somebody has done a blogging diary of a drug addict. Maybe some people have added some audio clips from an important meeting. Then I use that as icing on the cake.

Another university professor (Instructor 13) defined the "what else" as an innovative approach to content creation -- a quality echoed by four other educators as a crucial component of a good online story.

I think that excellence online, really comes back to creativity for me. Have they thought about some really interesting and out-of-the-norm link that they can include? ... Have they thought about a really specific question to throw out for an online chat? That's the kind of thing that would earn a student an A.

One college instructor (Instructor 11) said one of his students could theoretically earn an A for an excellent journalistic story that looked much like a newspaper and didn't contain many online-friendly features. But, he says, "The thing is, they would have to defend for me why they didn't do that. And it would have to make sense within the context of the theories that we teach."

Two final characteristics, mentioned by only one university professor (Instructor 5), were courage and intimacy. He said successful interactivity demands these qualities from online journalists:

The courage in taking risks -- do you have the courage to confront your ignorance? Creativity in looking at these new authoring tools and figuring out how to use them creatively and push them to their limit. The third thing was in terms of the kind of intimacy created in their product. Have you managed to narrow the distance between the know-it-all journalist at his bully pulpit from the poor, unwashed, ignorant masses? That's the standard model. How close could you get to your news consumer? How inviting could you be?

Workplace preparation

For many instructors, the topic of course goals was tightly bound to the issue of preparation for jobs in the workplace. Some said they were not preparing students this way -- and had strong opinions as to why they weren't. In fact, nearly all the educators had well-considered comments on the issue and many said their stand on this issue fundamentally shaped the way they approached their course instruction.

The responses broke down roughly along the divisions between college and university, with most colleges saying they were preparing students to step into online positions and most university instructors saying they weren't.

For one college educator (Instructor 10) the task was actually to prepare students for journalism jobs the industry hasn't adopted yet:

I think my students are learning to be leaders in the workplace. My students are prepared to walk into the newsrooms and a) understand the technology and b) be some people with vision. The news industry isn't necessarily [putting] a lot of thought into 'What the heck are we doing?' and 'What are we trying to achieve?' To me that's what the journalism school should do.

Another college educator (Instructor 12) said the program was structured so that students could step not just into a field, but into an actual job.

Yes, we do [prepare them for the workplace]. We're actually teaching all kinds of news and news coverage ... So they can actually tailor their course of study in the second semester to a specific medium if they want to, or a specific job within the field.

One university professor (Instructor 5) disagreed wholeheartedly, arguing tailoring a course to industry jobs was energy diverted from instructing students in fulfilling their obligations to the news consumer:

My main purpose can't be to try to prepare students for the industrial side. My job is to really get them thinking about the nature of what their sacred duties are and a sense of how to use these new developing tools to deliver these sacred duties.

Another university educator (Instructor 6) concurred, saying, "No ... I don't job-train them. I'm not saying we're going to focus on making sure you're absolutely ready to walk into Toronto Star online and take a job as an online editor."

He said he had polled online editors and producers and found that most intended to train their workers on their own technology anyway. Clearly, he said, industry workers want people who are familiar with computers, but he said they really want students who can master core journalistic techniques.

They want journalists. They want news judgment, intelligence, familiarity with the news, the ability to work quickly, to edit, to make changes, to chase stories, to do interviews and to have a good sense of what they're doing; especially if they're going to be part of a team that runs a live news site. Again and again I kept hearing -- those are the skills they want.

Instructor 1 agreed, saying:

When I bring in industry people and ask them to tell my students what they're looking for, they say we're looking for really smart, analytical minds who are good researchers, who have basic skills but who are willing to be flexible about where those ideas go. So you don't necessarily have to come with a complete Dreamweaver technical ability, but are you a good researcher? Are you a good interviewer? Can you think on your feet?

Still others came down in the middle. One university educator (Instructor 2) said he taught with the aim of students getting a job in the field, not any specific position.

Not a job in particular, but a job in general. Given two students coming out of journalism school who are identical in every respect, the fact that one them can help out with the magazine or newspaper's website and the other can't -- I think that's a big advantage.

In fact, a number of instructors said their students are getting their foot in the industry by stepping through a back entrance, not the front door. One community college instructor said his students tended to find work at community newspaper and many of those needed help in becoming more sophisticated. Another said most students get their initial job not at a large media outlet, but by helping someone build a blog -- or doing primarily non-web work at a media outlet but helping it periodically with its website content.

Indeed, the issue of student employment illustrated a complex tension that many educators saw between their curriculum and its application to the workplace.

For instance, some instructors said they aimed to prepare their students for a coming era of media convergence and wireless access to news. They said editors and reporters would need to tell stories using new narrative forms and a variety of media.

One educator (Instructor 10), for example, was clearly focused on her students mastering the practice of non-linear storytelling. Still, she acknowledged that the practice was limited in Canadian newsrooms.

"Are a lot of places chunking out stories? No. Do I think it's the way of the future? Yes."

Such comments exemplified some educators' desire to prepare students for the cutting edge of news delivery formats -- even in the absence of jobs to support them. A number said that they would be cheating their students if they prepared them for the relatively small number of existing jobs where they could practice online journalism full time.

"I'm not disillusioning anybody about it," said one university educator (Instructor 2). "As pessimistic as I am about any of them actually about making a living at this, I say if you can make a living, great, but don't expect to get rich off it."

Another college educator (Instructor 3) concurred, saying, "I'm not imagining any of them will get a full-time web gig out of it, for sure."

For Instructor 6, the prospect of graduating increasing numbers of online journalism graduates was worrisome.

I know several universities ... are experimenting with a whole stream of this. I find that unbelievable, frankly. One, how many fucking jobs are there in online journalism, starting tomorrow across Canada? So you're teaching a full complement of your students one area where the number of jobs in many cases in declining? And in most cases has never reached the potential that anyone thought it would.

Another university faculty member (Instructor 13) acknowledged the issue but saw signs of improvement in the industry.

I think, especially when I was hired five years ago now there were some people saying 'Will there actually be jobs for these students?' Is this something that we should be setting up in terms of expectations?" Luckily the tide has shifted a little bit over the last five years where you can now see that employers want people with some of these skills and there are definitely positions open.

Further, two educators -- one at a college and another at a university -- said their reluctance to focus on skills resulted directly from their experience in national newsrooms where young online journalism grads found themselves unhappily stuck doing repetitive technical work on the website not the multimedia journalism they expected. Instructor 3 put it this way:

I stress not having the HTML skills because it would be very easy for somebody to think they were getting a journalism position and end up getting a very, very low-level -- what's called a front-end programming -- job. And then they're going to be stuck in that rut for a long time without really much chance for advancement. It's a really bad ghetto to get into. So what I'm preparing them for is to have a better understanding of how to effectively make use of the web in whatever job they have.

Skills instruction

Ten of the 13 respondents said they gave their students a primer on Hypertext Markup Language, but none said they spent more than a single class on it. Many instructors echoed the comments of one college educator (Instructor 7), who said, "The software is becoming increasingly easy and it's becoming clear that in-depth HTML or Dreamweaver or Flash skills aren't what's needed for online journalism."

Another, Instructor 13, said:

For me it's like owning a car. I don't need to know everything about how to fix the engine; I do need to know how it works, so I don't get snowed. So I want students to know basically how HTML works, how Flash works. To know basically how RSS feeds work so that they can be a productive and helpful member of team. But it's all about journalism. Because in 10, 15 years the software will be different but the needs of storytelling will be the same.

Concerning specific software packages, nine used Adobe Dreamweaver for webpage creation. Seven used Adobe Photoshop for image editing and one used Adobe Fireworks. Five taught some level of Adobe Flash for interactive content. Five said they used a database-driven content management system to store story elements and publish online.

Only one educator had students making Flash presentations from scratch. The others, if they used Flash, supplied templates or had instructors assist in the content creation.

Four educators said their website content management system lessens the technical burden on students. Instructor 6 said further that since he implemented it for student production, he had more time to concentrate on journalistic issues -- which students crave.

[Students] come from areas like poli sci and history and other places, and their interest in technology is low. And they say, 'I didn't come here take tech; I came here to learn journalism -- so why am I doing all this crap?' So the CMS offered a really nice saw-off. They have to be familiar with how HTML works. They have to understand the process and the issues. But they don't necessarily have to become very technical.

In characterizing the relationship between the instruction of journalism and technical skills, all the educators said journalism counted for at least 50% of their efforts. At one end, a community college educator (Instructor 9) said he "came down pretty much 50-50" in his instruction, saying, "We graduate people who we expect to be able to go into a newsroom and function fully on the job."

A university educator (Instructor 1) concurred, saying the technical skills are of little use if the instructor can't use them effectively for journalism. Still, she said, the students crave the skills instruction:

That's a difficult one, actually. Because you're dealing with students who don't necessarily want to engage in the theory or the principles. They are very impatient to learn the technical skills. So personally I really feel like it's 50-50.

Still, almost all characterized the content of their course as overwhelmingly journalistic in nature. Only one instructor said the aim of his course was primarily to teach production skills, not journalism. Three said explicitly that their students' role in the workplace was to supply ideas -- and they needed only an understanding of the skills to be effective. One university educator (Instructor 13) said:

I try to tell them is that, particularly if they are working in a large organization, they will have the technical support. Their job is to be the storyteller and the idea person. To be able to think creatively about saying what we really need to tell this story about the bombing in Lebanon is an interactive map and what I want is to see if there are any webcams in that quadrant and how can we use GIS [geographic information systems] to map this.

Another of the three, a college educator (Instructor 12), said journalism schools have to do a better job of resisting the demands of the employers in order to serve their students best:

I work with a lot of the smaller newspapers that are just trying to save a buck. They want their web writer, but they want that person to be a journalist and an HTML expert. And it's just not going to work. I think we have to stay true to what our programs are about and stick with the editorial training more than we do the production training.

Effective teaching tools

The educators had a diverse range of exercises and assignments that they said have proven to be effective tools for teaching aspects of online journalism.

For example, instructors at two community colleges said they have organized groups of students to provide multimedia coverage of a single event. They believe the assignment gave students a sense of the deadlines inherent in live coverage and also the relationship of content across media.

One college educator (Instructor 11) arranged students to cover election debates for each of the last three municipal votes.

We streamed video and audio and created an interface where people debated what was going on in the hall. So what we had in Alumni Hall was three mayoralty candidates; we had some TV students shooting it, we took that, we digitized it; and we pumped that across the 'Net. We had about 150 people show up in the room and we had over 400 come online ... it was very exciting and very original.

Another educator (Instructor 4) had students covering college basketball games and delivering the content as a live webcast supplemented by text-based content.

They'd be directing, they'd be shooting, They'd have on-air people doing interviews and play-by-play and then the print students would be doing summaries of the game that had to be done within 15 minutes of the end of the game. And that was a neat experience for them. It is experimenting with it [convergence] in a way, but it is also trying to get them into the frame of mind that that's the world they're going to be working in.

A third college educator (Instructor 10) tested students' grasp of non-linear story structures by having them take a 1,200-word feature story originally published in print and adapt it for use online in a non-linear story construction.

The students had to identify the important facts required for each tier of the story and rework the narrative under deadline. The instructor said it was a good exercise in news judgment and editing.

"There are six facts that I'm looking for that have to be on that home page, and some of [the students] really struggle with that," she said. "It's a good assignment. It tests them. It really makes them think about a story and realizing that there are many doors."

One university professor (Instructor 13) said a simulated breaking news assignment provides a solid test of editing, news judgment and speed. Over a 50-minute class she sets up a pretend newswire where an event unfolded and students had to write updates to their story as sketchy facts become clearer. A missile attack turned out, in fact, to be an earthquake.

It challenges their sense of attribution, assumption -- core qualities we want to turn out regardless of the stream, but it's somehow heightened when they are working in that fast pace [for online].

Six instructors cited group tasks as the assignments that provided the most educational value. Two instructors said collaborative research assignments they likened to the "Indepth" (backgrounder) section of the CBC.ca website were effective.

"It's a real education for students to learn how to work effectively in groups," said Instructor 3.

"The best online stuff works because it's a collaborative effort," said Instructor 10.

"I really emphasize that all online work is teamwork; there is no way you can be a lone wolf," said a third, Instructor 6.

One university professor (Instructor 8) said at one time she critiqued student work herself in class following publication of each edition of the student website. She now has the students drive the discussion.

We now assign a pair of students to a story they didn't do. And they have to come to the post-mortem and dissect that story, critique it. Post-mortems used to be me leading the discussion -- what worked, what didn't, why it did, why it didn't. People tuned out and did all the things people do. So has that ever worked well.

Of the two educators who had students do collaborative blogs, Instructor 6 said it was, at times, an excellent means of reinforcing course themes. He didn't require the students to participate and he didn't grade them on it -- but these features were part of its appeal, he said:

In some years I'm happy to say the blog has been a lot about the course; about issues, about stories people find, about controversies that well up, interesting stuff that they stumble upon. What has been fascinating about that is - some people have been very good -- they post pictures, they post links, they post almost daily or two or three times a week -- and some of the blogs have continued [after they graduated].

Still, he said, in other years the blog has been "stupid" -- mainly about student gossip and romances.

The other instructor said his goal for the blog was to get students reacting to his teaching, and contributing ideas and opinions about issues they had come across. But "it didn't quite work out" (Instructor 7).

"Ideally it was going to be 60% written by me and 40% written by them -- it turned out to be almost 100% written by me," he said. "I'm going to have figure out how to make it attractive to get them there and keep them there."

Another college educator said students responded enthusiastically to a communications theory video he used to illustrate humans' limited comprehension while focusing on a task. The so-called Opaque Gorilla Video by Daniel J. Simons shows a group of students passing a ball in a room. Observers are asked to count the number of times certain members pass the ball. In an average test group, few observers notice that a woman in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the players, beats her chest and walks out.

This educator (Instructor 3) sums up the experience:

I ask how many of them saw the gorilla. Maybe three or four of them out of a class of 40 raise their hands. Then everybody looks at them and says, 'what gorilla?' Almost nobody sees it ... That's exactly the same as a user coming to a website -- say their husband has just had a stroke and they're looking for information to help them cope with that. They don't have time to see your gorilla.

Other instructors used alternative narrative styles to illustrate the possibilities of storytelling in the digital age. One college instructor used theories of myth-telling to put journalistic stories in context. Another used Janet H. Murray's book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace, to envision a future model for news. Murray's book explores how novelists, playwrights and filmmakers use interactive tales, stories as games, and games as stories to enliven a narrative.

For one university professor (Instructor 5), simply using new language was an effective way of getting students to consider a fresh approach to online presentation:

We used a different vocabulary. I didn't talk about leads or nutgraphs anything like that. We talked about invitations and contracts. We talked about headlines in an online environment as the invitation to come in ... The second is the kind of contract that you establish with your news consumer -- that you clearly put out what you are going to deliver. And then deliver on that.

Challenges

The educators in the survey identified a number of challenges to teaching online journalism. But the two mentioned most frequently -- by nine of the 13 respondents in total -- were the difficulty of teaching technical skills to students of varying abilities and the lack of time to teach them more effectively.

Seven of the 13 instructors said that, in addition to teaching journalism, they also provided the technical instruction. Two faculty members had instructors from complementary programs at the same institution teaching software and design skills. One professor had teaching assistants help with editing and production at certain times in the course. Another three hired students part time to either help with website development or act as a technical resource for other students.

As Instructor 6 said, the stresses of teaching production skills were significant:

I would say time is the biggest challenge and the learning curve. I have people who, honest to God, I guess they know how to work a computer, but you could hardly tell -- up to people who have done full Dreamweaver courses, have their own website, who are very confident with the technology. What do you do? How do you teach a class that doesn't completely terrify the less knowledgeable students?

Other university instructors echoed the same experience.

"I think many of us operate under the illusion that our students are very techno-savvy," said Instructor 13. "Some of them are, but I have a lot of students who are very phobic coming into that intro to online [course]."

Instructor 9 added: "We'll have some people who are almost able to look at Dreamweaver to be a able to use it. We have others who really plod, who find it really difficult. That is challenging -- it's very, very challenging."

"Everything on a computer always takes as lot longer than you think it's going to do. So it's time-consuming," said another (Instructor 8).

Teaching skills may be a challenge for the instructor - but it's clearly greater for some students. One college faculty member (Instructor 3) said it was frustrating not being able to serve them as well as he wished:

One of the realities of group work -- especially around anything technical -- is that the students who aren't technically minded will find the nerd-boy or nerd-girl in the group and they end of doing all the nerd work. The class stratified into people who had grasped the technical thing and those who hadn't. So the people who couldn't might have felt a little left behind.

One university educator (Instructor 1) expressed outright exasperation at the expectations placed upon her:

You couldn't run a television lab without a TV broadcast technician. But somehow with the idea of the web being so accessible there is this sense that you don't need a technician. [Online educators] are supposed to be all knowing. It's a bit frustrating. The lack of technical help was really difficult.

The other concern -- a familiar refrain to all instructors -- was the lack to time to spend on the curriculum. Six instructors mentioned this as another key challenge.

"Number two is just not enough time to do everything really well," said one university professor (Instructor 6).

"I find it tough," one college instructor (Instructor 10) added as well. "It's just a lot to cram in and I have to determine 'Am I skimming too much off the surface of things and not going deep enough?' I mean the struggle for an online journalism instructor is to determine how deep you go."

Mentioned by a few instructors was just the general demand of keeping current in such a fast-paced emerging field. Some said they had to redraft many of their lectures each year. Instructor 6 said he was still concerned about the demand for online journalists in the industry, given current practices and technologies, saying, "I don't know really how fruitful an area this is out in the workplace. I'm always questioning what's happening out there. And what we should be doing."

Future instruction

Three participants said they hoped to pay more attention in the coming year to so-called Web 2.0 tools, a phrase that represents a variety of web applications used to "mash" data on the web and support collaboration.

For one college educator (Instructor 12), it was time to devote attention to narrative forms that have emerged over the past couple of years:

There is a whole shift in what's happening in the web that I think [pause] I think, we have to pay attention to. And that's the whole blogging, podcasting, interactive journalism, where people are taking part in the development of your story.

Another concurred, saying she intended to have students stage a group debate over whether blogging is journalism.

For another college instructor, it was increasingly important that he devote instructional time to discuss tagging [user-generated categorizations of content] or [geographical] mapping.

One university professor (Instructor 6) said he would like to be able to support students next year who wanted to create a podcast. But his ideal would be to undertake a journalism project whereby students would truly interact with a target community.

I'd love it -- just talking dreaming for a minute -- if the course and the year allowed for a site to be built where students could connect with the community and actually experiment with a community-based participatory journalism site. I think that would be fantastic ...Instead of us sitting around jawing about issues, they could actually live them. You know, maybe people sending in digital photos from a student protest. And then someone files a story. Is the story accurate? How do they know? And should they trust the citizen journalist? Do they have to double-check the source and get a second source from the student protest? Or if they allowed blogging, how would they deal with flamers and people posting libelous information All of these things would be really real for them and it would be really neat.

One college instructor said she would like to teach video and audio editing but probably couldn't with the time and resource conditions under which she taught.

A university professor said she wanted to find some way to replicate the 24-hour news cycle.

Two university instructors said they simply wished to have more time to devote to core journalistic skills:

"Honestly, what I saw in terms of the quality of stories was there could have been more time spent on the actual reporting skills and writing skills," said Instructor 1.

Another concurred, saying, "I often think, God, we could have spent more time on interviewing, on story structure" (Instructor 6).

Finally, two educators said they hoped their institution would eventually restructure the program to remove the distinction of online journalism and begin to recognize the emerging online characteristics of "traditional" media.

"Ideally what I'd like to see is online media integrated into all of the journalism course we teach," said Instructor 7.

Another (Instructor 9) said, "I think more and more online publications and utilizing online are going to start to become embedded in other courses as well. The distinction between journalism and online journalism -- that line is starting to blur."