Teaching News Literacy As A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): Pedagogical Strategies, Technological Architecture and Computer-Based Research Implications

Abstract

This paper discusses a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on news literacy taught by the researcher titled “HKU04x Making Sense of News,” which was offered on edX, the non-profit online education portal founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, between May 19 and June 29, 2015. More than 7,500 students from 147 countries have enrolled in the six-week course. The preliminary research presented in the paper taps into the large quantity of students’ demographic and behavioral data that logged every single mouse click, video player control, activity participation and all the other interactions between each learner and the learning platform in order to explore how educators could take advantage of the learning analytics. It looks at specific variables such as the relationship between the frequency of discussion forum posts and assignment grades, and educational background and overall assignment scores. The findings demonstrate the possibilities and future directions of news and media literacy teaching and research in the digital age. The paper discusses some of the pertinent key elements of news literacy education in today’s technologically interconnected societies while exploring the idea of future computer modeling that could give move insight into the design of effective curriculum, instructional design, technological architecture and other teaching plans and strategies.