By Anna Burkart
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| Maybe classrooms will be more empty due to online courses gain popularity, but j-school newsrooms probably won't be empty anytime soon. |
The classrooms are empty with no students to be seen. Everyone is turning in their reporting assignments online and professors are judging students’ reporting abilities without ever meeting them. Could this be journalism schools of the future? The empty classroom image is certainly making its way around sites like Nieman Journalism Lab and PBS Media Shift in the discussion about free online journalism courses.
This past December, the University of Texas’ Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas held it’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). It attracted more than 2,000 students from around the world looking for a free “Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization” course. With online courses growing in popularity, the question becomes: Will online journalism degrees be the norm someday soon?
