Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course

You may feel excitement or dread — or a combination of the two — if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It’s a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you’re likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which to cover everything. —Mindy McAdams —Teaching Online Journalism: How to Build the First College-Level Course (Online Journalism Review)

I won’t teach the “Newswriting” course again until Fall 2005, but I will be teaching a new one-credit “Media Lab” course that will be for those students who want academic credit for working on the student paper. Our first job will be beefing up the website for The Setonian Online, which at the moment is essentially an archive of our print content, poured in to an HTML template. We can do better than that, though, if I can manage to tap into the enthusiasm and talent my students have so far shown. This should be exciting.