LEARNING MEDIA-ETHICS ONLINE OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF A NET-LIKE COURSE-STRUCTURE

The digitization is an essential component of our everyday life and leads at the same time to changes especially in the world of media. Tags like “participatory journalism”, “robot journalism” or “algorithmic media” evidence the changes that have occurred on both the producer and the recipient side. Through these developments, the area of media ethics continues to gain in importance. Above all, the subsection of digital ethics with its links to technical ethics and information ethics are also relevant for non-journalists. Critically monitoring, evaluating and justifying current change processes in the media and developments in digitization, as well as reflecting on the behavior of individual media usage, are relevant skills for everyone. With the demand for more media ethics competence, one of the main challenges facing the department becomes clear: How should “media ethics” be communicated to a broad and correspondingly heterogeneous audience?

The online course “Ethics of Digital Communication” tries to make the content accessible to a broad public through a non-linear course structure. The online course is currently being developed in the context of the Bavarian Virtual University as a cooperation project of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Munich School of Philosophy and the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. The net-like course structure should meet the different specialist requirements and experiences of the students and at the same time allow them to explore the contents according to their own interests and learning preferences. The freedom offered by such a course building is accompanied by new challenges that occur both on the course mentoring and development side and on the learner’s side. Skills such as self-organization as well as a reflection of one’s own learning process become relevant on the learner’s side and require close individual support. On the developer’s side, on the other hand, it is necessary to rethink how the content of a nonlinear learning environment should logically linked. The individual learning units should therefore be arranged comprehensibly – at the same time each unit should be understood without the prior knowledge of the other modules. In order to meet these requirements, the online course “Ethics of Digital Communication” is divided into three levels:
• On one level, concrete phenomena and cases that are worthy of discussion from a media ethics point of view (such as the topic “fake news” or “data protection”) are presented.
• On a further level, classical discourse fields of media ethics (such as “credibility and trust in journalism” or “privacy and the public”) are considered in further detail.
• On a third level, abstract concepts and backgrounds of media ethics (such as “truth” or “ethics and law”) are discussed.

The individual modules that are treated on the three levels are content-wise, but not build on each other. Which topics are processed according to which order and which levels and when, is up to the students.

The planned contribution, preferably in oral form, uses the example course to show, which opportunities and challenges lie ahead. Furthermore should be discussed, which didactical and methodical approaches can be used in a net-like structured learning environment successfully.