Knight Center to limit second MOOC on infographics to 5,000 participants; Last spots available

As of Thursday, Dec. 20, some 4,500 people from dozens of countries have already registered for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas’ second Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which will start in January 2013. Registration is still open but it will be limited to 5,000 participants.

Due to high demand, the Knight Center’s second MOOC will be an identical iteration of the first course, “Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization.” It will be taught again by Instructor Alberto Cairo, an internationally renowned expert in the field who teaches at the University of Miami.

“The appetite for training in journalism, especially in this area of infographics and data visualization, is amazing,” said Professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center. “The fact that we just offered a successful massive course for 2,000 people from more than 100 countries and, in just three weeks, 4,500 have already registered is a testament to the great demand for skills in data visualization. This time our MOOC will accept more than double the number of participants. Due to server capacity and the levels of interactivity that Alberto Cairo adopts in the course, we decided to limit the number of students to 5,000.”

Just like the first edition of the course, Cairo’s second class will focus on how to work with graphics to communicate and analyze data. Previous experience in information graphics and visualization is not needed to take this course. With the readings, video lectures and tutorials available, participants will acquire enough skills to start producing compelling, simple infographics almost immediately. Participants can expect to spend 4-6 hours per week on the course.

The Knight Center’s pioneering MOOC has been designed especially for this new, massive format, featuring student-student and instructor-student interactions. The MOOC will be free for anyone from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. It will be open to journalists and non-journalists alike.

Click here to register now for the second edition of this six-week MOOC in English, which will start on Jan. 12, 2013 and end on Feb. 23. More information about the course and how to enroll in it can be found here.

Cairo is a renowned expert in the field of infographics. He is currently a professor at the University of Miami’s School of Communication and has taught several regular online courses at the Knight Center’s distance learning platform. Chapters of Cairo’s new book, The Functional Art are used in the course. He also uses his Twitter account @AlbertoCairo to complement class discussions.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas was created in 2002 by Professor Rosental Alves at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism thanks to a generous donation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has been supporting it continually. The Center also receives major contributions from the Open Society Foundations and The University of Texas at Austin. The Center’s main goal is to help journalists in Latin American and the Caribbean to improve the quality of journalism in their countries.