Designing a Distance Education Course in Environmental Journalism

Environmental communication studies, like most fields of teaching and learning today, are subject to the trend toward flexible, self-directed, and lifelong learning. This means EC education is no longer confined to lecture halls and tutorial rooms of universities but has also expanded to online contexts. Non-university institutions now offer EC courses, many taught wholly or partly online. Although there is an established literature on online pedagogy, little work has been published specifically on teaching any aspect of EC online or by distance education. This chapter aims to help fill that gap.

The discussion here, therefore, analyzes the design of a distance education course in environmental journalism to be offered by a new online journalism school as part of a professional certificate in journalism. The course is written and will be tutored online by this author, who has previously taught online, partly online, and face-to-face university courses in journalism, media, and communications. I argue here it is not only the instruction itself but also the pedagogical model that informs the teaching material that is a crucial consideration in EC course design. This may be particularly so for distance or online education offerings, which, if designed well, can have an advantage over lecture-style, face-to-face courses by encouraging learners' own construction of knowledge, thereby enhancing their capacity for real-world application of new learning. In this context, this study seeks to show how competent course design might allow EJ to be effectively taught and learned online, addressing many of the concepts and theories that inform the field of EC as a whole.