The Knight Center has offered online courses since 2003 and began to expand its distance learning program with the launch of its first MOOC in October 2012. Since then, the Center's MOOCs have reached more than 275,000 students from 200 countries and territories. Initially, the program was focused on online classes for small groups of journalists, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean. Eventually, the Knight Center began offering Massive Open Online Courses, developing the world’s first MOOC program specializing in journalism training. The MOOCs are free, and participants can receive a certificate of completion for a nominal fee. The Knight Center also holds more advanced online courses, at a low-cost, for smaller groups of students. We keep the fees as low as possible in an effort to make our courses available to as many people as possible.
Our courses cover a variety of topics, including digital journalism techniques, fact-checking and verification, computer-assisted reporting, data visualization, and more. Our MOOCs and courses for smaller groups last four to five weeks. They are conducted completely online and taught by some of the most respected, experienced journalists and journalism trainers in the world. The courses take full advantage of multimedia; they feature video lectures, discussion forums, audio slideshows, self-paced quizzes, and other collaborative learning technologies. Our expert instructors provide a quality learning experience for journalists seeking to improve their skills and citizens looking to become more engaged in journalism and democracy.
The courses are offered on the https://kccourses.org, our Moodle platform. They are asynchronous, so participants can log in on the days and times that are most convenient for them. Each course, however, is open just for a specific period of time and access to it is restricted to registered students.
The Knight Center team is led by Professor Rosental Calmon Alves, who holds the UNESCO Chair in Communication and the Knight Chair in Journalism at the Moody College of Communication’s School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Alves, a veteran Brazilian journalist, moved to Austin in 1996 as the inaugural holder of the Knight Chair. He is a former president of Orbicom, the global network of UNESCO Chairs in Communication. Professor Alves is the chair of the board of the Maria Moors Cabot Awards at Columbia University and a member of many international boards of organizations related to journalism, such as the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His three areas of teaching and research are international news, especially the work of foreign correspondents in Latin America; Latin American journalism and press freedom; and digital journalism. He founded the Knight Center in 2002.
Summer Harlow is the associate director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is on leave from Texas A&M University where she’s an associate professor.
She is a former Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Fellow, and she won the Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award for best dissertation in the field from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She has written two books: Digital Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism (Routledge, 2022), and Liberation Technology in El Salvador: Re-appropriating Social Media among Alternative Media Projects (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), which won the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Book prize.
Her research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, New Media & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Digital Journalism. Currently, she is the primary investigator for El Salvador and Guatemala in the Wolds of Journalism Study. She also is the Book Reviews Editor for the International Journal of Press/Politics.
