Of craft beer and learning how to be a journalist in the 21st century

I live in Oregon, and I like craft beer.

But, even though I live in a beer snob town, I’m not a huge beer snob. I go down to the grocery store on the corner almost every day, pick up a bottle or two, walk them home, and drink them.

It’s pretty easy. I’m a consumer, I have a vendor, I have some products to choose from, and my “problem” gets solved quickly and efficiently.

Most of the journalism educators and students reading this post are probably a lot like me. It pleases us that products typically provide solutions that simplify the complexities of every day life.

As described in my prior Medium post on journalism innovation, and related to my current work on an online learning initiative called altJschool (via the Tow-Knight Fellowship in Disruptive Journalism Education), I have another “problem,” and I’m looking for a solution.

To recap: I need a convenient and flexible way to offer innovative and robust journalism courses for students at my smallish public liberal arts university. I also need it to be “right-sized,” such that courses are economically viable from the point-of-view of my students and my institution, whether I’m trying to enroll one student, or 30. And I need the courses to embody a set of important values around innovation, technology, and the social experience of participating in a great college course, even in the case that the course might be offered online.

It might not be a popular take among the primary audiences for this post, but what I really need is a product: a digital experience that students can easily license, and which probably includes some other important features. These features include college credit, viability for accreditation purposes, and eligibility for funding via student financial aid packages.

It’s not strictly a requirement for my dream product, but it seems likely that the economic and academic vitality of such a product entails online learning across institutional and geographic constraints.

In my search of other candidates to solve this problem, I’ve encountered several noteworthy “products” that each solve some subset of my problem.

These have included Massive Open Online Courses such as those offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas; online code bootcamps such as Treehouse and Epicodus; Seth Godin’s altMBA workshops; online course modules in journalism such as those offered by the Poynter Institute and the Google News Initiative; and even fully online degree programs in journalism such as those offered by Penn State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Southern Illinois University — Carbondale.

All those alternatives do a good job of solving some problems for some instructors and students. But they don’t fully solve my problem of offering innovative journalism courses to my students without disrupting my other teaching commitments. So the question before me entails figuring out how to source or build a “product” that combines the right set of features drawn from all of the other options visible in the landscape.

That all seems like a heavy lift. Institutions in higher education are notoriously resistant to playing well with others, and the bureaucratic challenge of launching a sustainable curriculum of courses for credit seems daunting. (OR MAYBE NOT? SPOILER ALERT! STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES!).

While the suspense builds, here is my ask of journalism educators and students who might be reading this post:

• Do other faculty share my problem? Among you and your students, how much interest is there for new and innovative online learning experiences in journalism?
• Where have you or your students experienced really fulfilling online learning experiences in journalism?
• What are some course topics that you would like to offer at your institution, but are not able because of limitations in resources or other constraints?

Please join the conversation on Facebook or Slack, or hit me up via Twitter (@erikpalmer) or email (palmere@sou.edu).

Better yet, come to Austin in September and we’ll talk about it there. I’ll buy you a beer.