A media-literacy MOOC

Good news: The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University has received funding from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation to create a Massive Open Online Course, better known as a MOOC, on digital media literacy. Many thanks to the foundation, which is a big believer that media/news literacy is essential to our civil well-being.

We’ll be basing the MOOC on an online course I currently teach for ASU Online, the university’s online-education arm. That course is based on Mediactive, which will be some of the core reading  material for the MOOC.

The jury is out, to put it mildly, on the ultimate value of MOOCs. Clearly they’ve been oversold in some ways–to think that they’ll take over education is silly–but equally clearly they have enormous potential (and real) value for some purposes. We hope to make this course a super-useful learning experience.

As we develop it, we’re going to be as open as possible on how we’re approaching the topic. Openness is core to my work–the Mediactive book is free to download and available under a Creative Commons copyright license (“Some Rights Reserved”)–and I want to apply that principle to the new project.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading and hearing about how this goes. And if you’re intrigued enough to help out, please do. I’m looking for the best ideas, not just my own ones.