This course is asynchronous, meaning there are no required live events, and you can complete activities at your own pace throughout each week.

The material is organized into six modules covering various topics through videos, guest speakers, readings, and discussion forums:

Introduction Module – Fundamentals 

In the introductory module, you will get an overview of the course structure and meet the instructors. You’ll also read about the fundamentals of digital investigations and get your computer set up with the correct (free!) software and plugins.

Module 1 – Workflow and archiving

One of the most challenging aspects of digital investigations is ensuring you’re gathering and organizing all the profiles, websites, screenshots, and other information in a way that makes it easy to analyze and include in a story. It’s also important to set yourself up for future success by collecting the tools you need in an easy to access way. We’ll show you how.

This module will cover:

• Best practices for collecting digital assets and how to use free tools like Osinttracker to visualize connections
• Using tools like the Wayback Machine and others to archive content
• Auto-archiving to archive.org and the Bellingcat auto archive tool
• Approaches to organizing and archiving visual material 

Module 2 – Search and sourcing 

With this module, we’ll look at approaches for using Google advanced search to aid our reporting. From there, we’ll look at how we can use the tool to find sources on various social media platforms. Then, we’ll snowball our findings across various social media platforms. 

This module will cover:

• Google advanced search for individuals, documents, and social media groups
• Using various social media platforms to look for eyewitnesses or first-person media
• Cross-referencing information on various social media platforms to build on what we’ve found

Module 3 – Visuals and mapping 

We’ll dig into fundamental approaches for analyzing visual material. From there, we will go over Geolocation and dig into mapping and satellite services to build on our findings. 

This module will cover:

• Image analysis fundamentals and geolocation approaches 
• Creating maps for your investigations 
• Understanding public mapping and satellite services to aid your reporting 

Module 4 – Investigating people and companies  

People and/or companies appear in most, if not every, story. This week shows you how to use a range of useful tools for researching usernames, email addresses and phone numbers, and walks you through useful databases for backgrounding names and companies.

This module will cover:

• Fundamentals for digital backgrounding of people and companies 
• How to use username, email, and phone number enumeration tools
• Databases for researching companies

Module 5 – Using AI in your reporting  

There’s a lot of hype about Artificial Intelligence. Our final module focuses on a few straightforward ways to integrate AI into investigative work.

This module will cover:

• The basics of AI tools like large language models like ChatGPT and some simple rules for how to use AI in reporting.
• Using AI to assist with online searches and document analysis
• New tools for using AI to analyze images and video