Deutsche Welle launches its first open online course for journalists in Arab countries

The Open Media Summit is DW Akademie's first open online course. Live video discussions, online resources and social media create a shared learning environment for citizen journalists and bloggers from the Arab world. 

From now until December 16, participants in the Open Media Summit can take part in interactive online training sessions on topics such as the responsible use of online information sources, the potential of data-driven journalism and Internet censorship. The main language of the course is Arabic and there is also an English website. Participation in the Open Media Summit (#OMS 2012) is free and it is open to anyone interested from North Africa and other Arab countries.

"Aside from on-site workshops," says Gerda Meuer, Managing Director of DW Akademie, "the Internet - especially Facebook and Twitter - lends itself to training opportunities for bloggers and citizen journalists." DW Akademie is testing how e-learning and social media outlets can successfully be combined for shared learning and teaching based on the massive open online course (MOOC) concept. MOOCs are a new educational format currently being widely discussed, especially in higher education circles.

DW Akademie's Open Media Summit has involved experts from the region and developed the course based on their expertise. "We expect the Internet activists to actively contribute to the educational progress of the participants with their input," says Meuer, describing the idea behind the project. "Our intention is to bring together the knowledge from the region and pass it on."

The OMS 2012 is part of a larger project to provide support and training to social media activists from the region and is conducted jointly with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) with funding by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is the first project of its kind inmedia development activities for the Arab world and ties into Deutsche Welle's longstanding commitment to online activists and citizen journalists. In 2004, Deutsche Welle initiated the annual Deutsche Welle Blog Awards - The BOBs - and was the first broadcaster in the country to launch its own YouTube channels and Facebook pages.

The virtual OMS campus is online at dw-akademie.de/oms2012. In addition, there is a dedicated Facebook group as well as Twitter feed. Reporters Without Borders supports the online event on topics related to Internet censorship.

Join the Open Media Summit on Twitter: #oms2012

(Source : Deutsche Welle)