First aid to learn how to cover the EU

Covering the EU can seem very overwhelming for a journalism student – or a journalism teacher, for that matter. Now a new online course in 14 modules will help journalism students understand policy-making in Europe and tap on relevant data and sources.

Arena for Journalism in Europe is part of the COPE consortium behind the material and has provided the modules on research methods, especially on data gathering and visualization, and on collaborative reporting. Behind the work are team members Brigitte Alfter, Hazel Sheffield, and Adriana Homolová.

The COPE consortium consists of journalism institutes in 27 countries, coordinated by TU Dortmund, working together to produce the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). It is available in all EU languages, and selected modules have”local windows” to allow journalism students to include country-specific content.

We hope that the course will promote even more cross-border collaboration and professional coverage of European issues in future generations of European journalists.

The COPE MOOC is co-funded by the European Union with a budget of 1 mio. euro to facilitate the production of content of all 14 modules, the translation, and the technical set-up of 27 national MOOCs.

Read more and download the material