Abstract:

As part of an international experience of collaboration between our universities we set up a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for Journalism students from Carlos III University of Madrid and the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies of the University of Cardiff. We organized a meeting between students from a Magazine Design Course with students from an Information Resources for Data Journalism Course. Our MOOC was used to explain the main content of each course and put them together to work through a common platform account on Google Drive. Our main aim was to put students from two different learning environments together to work towards a common goal. This goal was to edit a magazine for university students. The magazine had to be published online and also in paper format. By creating this experience, we wanted to demonstrate that MOOCS courses are not just for individual students around the world, but that MOOCS can also be very useful for sharing contents and skills between two different courses to achieve the same aim.
However, to make the activity of our students, who had no common knowledge between them, more interactive we focused on how important a role social networks can play for organizing common tasks and activities during the courses. In fact, our students used the Facebook account opened specifically for our innovative teaching project. This account became an ideal framework for creating the articles our magazine required.
We began with two MOOC courses. One was on Information Resources for Data Journalism and the other on Magazine Design. We used them to teach the main contents of both courses to all our students. Once the students decided on a topic for an article to write in group, they then used Facebook and Google Drive to share contents and to prepare the design and infographies used in the news piece they were working on.
To sum up, we edited a magazine created by students from two different courses taken at two different universities. In conclusion, we have demonstrated how the latest communication technologies and teaching can make it easier for universities separated by large distances to learn together in a collaborative way.

Keywords:

MOOC, Journalism, magazine design, Facebook, data journalism, collaborative teaching