Journalistic Ethics – Free Online Video – Jim Newton, UCLA
This week my Distance Learning course asked us to look at an Open Source course. An Open Source course allows to take a quality course, from an accredited institution, entirely for free. The incentive for students to take this course is not for college credit but instead gives the students the opportunity to build knowledge in areas they are hopefully interested in. As we reviewed the course, we were asked to reflect on or assess the course; is the course carefully pre-planned and designed for a distance learning environment? Does the course follow the recommendations for online instruction and does the course offer activities that maximize active learning for the students?
The course I decided to look at was Journalistic Ethics offered by UCLA and taught by Jim Newton, an editor-at-large for the LA Times. The course description defines the The course as an intensive examination of ethical and policy issues arising from interaction for media institutions and societal institutions. I chose this course because I have a minor in journalism and thought I would be able to relate things I can learn in this course to information that I learned so many years ago.
At first look the course doesn’t offer a lot when it comes to distances learning. The course is basically a single camera static shot of Professor Newton’s lectures on the campus at UCLA. Engagement wise the presentation is very lacking, the professor is standing behind a table, speaking to and answering questions from students in attendance but not seen on camera. Plus, there are no graphics that can help the learner stay on track, except for a yellow lower third graphic that tells you the course and which class meeting this video was recorded in. The open source site speaks nothing about a classroom text that will help with the class, but it is often referred to at the end of the daily lectures.
When looking at Bate’s 12 “Golden Rules” for use of technology in education, this journalistic ethics course really meet some of the guidelines of how to design and develop an distance education course. First of all Bates says Interaction is essential, the open source site is hosted on youtube, and the most interaction that you can have is leaving comments at the bottom of the page, which are usually filled with comments of how students didn’t appreciate the lecture. Bates also says that courses should offer 4 different types of media (print, audio, video and computer interaction) available to teachers and learners. The course most definitely does not meet these. The only medium that I was able to find was video, the course seem to be so lacking in media that it didn’t even offer a syllabus or course guidelines that the student would be able to follow. Most importantly , the course didn’t follow good teaching strategies, it did not offer learning activities that would allow the learners interact with what they are learning and show that learning was happening.(Simonson)
All in all the course seemed to be very helpful in developing a better understanding of journalistic ethics, in ways its quite interesting, looking at the decisions that instructor had made and how he related historic events that he covered with those ethical decisions that had to be made.
References
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2012). Teaching and learning at a
distance: Foundations of distance education (5th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
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