With Google’s support, Knight Center offers MOOC in Spanish on developing journalistic projects for the web

In an effort to promote the creation and development of sustainable and

quality digital journalism projects in Spanish, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, with the support of Google, will offer this month the Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) “Development of Journalistic Projects for the Web: an Introduction to Entrepreneurial Journalism.” Click here to register.

Google’s support will allow the course to be complimented with a special scholarship to recognize the best projects developed or perfected during the MOOC. The Google-Knight Center scholarship will be offered to at least six participants from Latin America and will consist in a trip to Austin, Texas to attend two digital journalism conferences that the Knight Center will host in April 2014.

This new massive online course in Spanish will be offered for free and last four weeks, starting on Nov. 18 and concluding on Dec. 15. The instructor will be U.S. journalist Janine Warner, an expert in digital technologies and author of 25 books on the topic.

This training program is mainly aimed for journalists and journalism professors and students in Latin America, but just like all of the Knight Center’s MOOCs, anyone in the world with access to the Internet can take it.

This will be the seventh course that the University of Texas’ Knight Center offers through its MOOC program since it was created a year ago.

“We are very thankful for Google’s support in carrying out this unprecedented online training program for Spanish-speaking journalists, mainly in Latin America. We’re also lucky to have Janine Warner, an excellent instructor with ample experience teaching journalists how to use digital tools,” said Professor Rosental Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center.

“Development of Journalistic Projects for the Web” is designed to teach students practical skills to launch a news website or any other journalistic project based on digital content. The course seeks to promote the creation of news sites in Spanish and increase the number and quality of digital publications available in this language.

“Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world today, but only 5 percent of all web content is in this language. It is imperative to train and create incentive models to promote the production of digital content for the cultural, economic and social development of Hispanic America,” said Ana Paula Blanco, Google’s communications director in the region. “We want a web that is increasingly relevant for Spanish speakers. That’s why we create and support initiatives like these.”

The course will focus on how to create business plans for digital platforms, attract audiences and develop sources of income. It will feature case studies and guest experts who will share with participants real-life examples, success stories and firsthand accounts of the challenges and opportunities that digital publications face.

At the end of the course, the participants who are journalists or journalism professors and students in Latin America will be able to apply for the Google-Knight Center scholarship. Six course participants will be chosen to travel to Austin, Texas, all expenses paid, to attend the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) and the Ibero American Digital Journalism Colloquium on April 2014.

The Knight Center has organized ISOJ each year since 1999. The conference has become one of the most important events in the world to discuss trends and developments in the field of digital journalism. The Colloquium takes place immediately after ISOJ and offers journalists in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula a forum to discuss the specific challenges of the region.

“Development of Journalistic Projects for the Web” will be taught by journalist Janine Warner, a specialist in the use of digital technologies and author of 25 books on the topic. She is a well-known instructor with ample international experience who was taught at the University of Miami and the University of Southern California. She was director of operations at MiamiHerald.com.

“It is a great satisfaction to have the opportunity to collaborate with the Knight Center, particularly in this course on entrepreneurial journalism focused in Latin America,” Warner said. “In my many trips to the region I’ve always been impressed by the fighting spirit and creativity and their willingness to learn about new technologies. I hope that this course will help stimulate this growing and necessary interest.”

Although the course will be free, if participants need to receive a certificate, there will be a $30 administrative fee, paid online via credit card, for those who meet the certificate requirements. The certificate will be issued only to students who actively participated in the course and who complied with most of the course requirements, such as quizzes and exercises. The certificates will be sent via email as a PDF document. No formal course credit of any kind is associated with the certificate.

The Knight Center became a pioneer in massive journalism online education when it launched its MOOC program in Oct. 2012. Unlike most MOOCs, the Knight Center’s massive courses are created specifically for this program and seek to encourage the largest amount of student-to-student and instructor-to-students interactions as possible.

Google is a world-leading technology firm dedicated to improve the ways in which people connect with information. Google’s innovations in Internet search and advertising have made its website one of the main products online and its brand one of the most recognizable in the world.

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas is an international leader in online training for journalists. The Center was created in 2002 in the University of Texas at Austin thanks to generous grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. SInce it launched its pioneering Distance Learning program, the Knight Center has trained more than 7,000 journalists across all Spanish-speaking countries and offered more than 100 regular online courses. In 2012 the Center launched the first journalim Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in the world. Since then, the Knight Center’s MOOCs have reached more than 20,000 participants around the world.