Online Journalism Teaching and Learning Processes Beyond the Classroom and the University: Experiences in International Virtual Collaboration on Multimedia Projects

Abstract

The current media need for employees capable of producing multiplatform content and thriving in collaborative environments. This has made digital journalism one of the fields considered to have the greatest potential today for promoting professional, research, and teaching innovation. In fact, online journalism has played a major role in the renovation of communications curricula over the past two decades. This article examines a case study on a teaching innovation project in online journalism based on the Internationalization at Home (IaH) transversal perspective. It can be considered as the first project examining this perspective in the journalism-teaching field. The examined project was carried out by teachers and researchers of five Ibero-American universities with the aim that virtual international students of the five universities collaborated for the production of multimedia in-depth news reports. The article thus analyses the teaching innovation experience and discusses it in terms of advantages and disadvantages.

Course Internationalization Through Virtual Exchange: Students’ Reflections About “Seeing the World Through the Lens That is Soccer”

“…This goes back to constructivism theory (Woo & Reeves, 2007): Through a social interaction and collaboration, students corrected and added to their prior knowledge to gain a deeper meaning and understanding about the world. Like Bowen et al's (2019) Australian and Pakistani graduate students or Larrondo Ureta et al's (2021) Ibero-American undergraduate students, the American students who participated in this VE project learned to look at a topic from another…”

“…Although local phrases in the language created some confusion, students were largely able to communicate with each other without the need for any translation tool. That would not be the case of every VE project as discussed by Ureta et al (2021) whose students spoke either Spanish or Portuguese, and thus communicated in English as a common language instead. However, sharing English as their main language in college also caused U.S. and English students to have low expectations when it comes to cultural differences, and they were "surprised" to notice many more differences than expected.…”

“…However, they benefit mostly socially advantaged students (Bilecen & van Mol, 2017;Bowen et al, 2019;Jager et al, 2019). That is why U.S. campuses have recently duplicated their efforts toward curriculum internationalization (Duffy et al, 2020), that is, internationalization at home (Ureta et al, 2021). Therefore, though "the current level of awareness of VE is not very high" (Jager et al, 2019, p. 23), VE projects are still starting to flourish, prompting O'Dowd ( 2018) to talk about a "mushroom-like emergence of virtual exchange initiatives" (p. 3) in academia.…”

“…They concluded VE projects could provide important benefits to students, including "the opportunity to view the world from an unfamiliar perspective" (p. 62). Second, Ureta et al (2021) discussed a VE journalism project involving five universities in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. They presented details of their VE, which resulted in the production of multimedia projects, and emphasized the importance of interactivity in the classroom, which can help curve the many communication issues students faced.…”

“…VE has indeed become an effective way to internationalize university curricula from home (Duffy et al, 2020;Ureta et al, 2021) in an inclusive manner (Verzella, 2018). As O'Dowd (2018) explains, the term VE is an "umbrella term" (p. 4)-other terms referring to VE may include Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) or telecollaboration.…”