Data journalism MOOC to run again with added language support

Regional newsroom partners include IndiaSpend (India), Malaysiakini (Malaysia), KataData (Indonesia), Caixin (China) and Health Analytics India (India). Partners at the Graduate School of Mass Communications & Public Relations of Konkook University in Korea and DataLEADS in India will also provide additional support to students from their regions.

“The data journalism MOOC was by all accounts a big success, and so we’re very excited to be partnering once more with Google to rerun the course again for a wider audience in three local languages,” said Keith Richburg, JMSC director. “We're starting out now with Korean, Hindi and Chinese, and will possibly add more languages down the line.”

“This is a real model of how the JMSC's partnership with Google News Lab can produce insightful and impactful content for everyone—working journalists, students and dabblers alike," Richburg added.

"Google News Lab is thrilled to once again support HKU's data journalism MOOC and its expansion into Chinese, Korean and Hindi,” said Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab Lead, APAC. “Data journalism is a burgeoning field in Asia and this course can bring those skills into more newsrooms around Asia, strengthening accountability journalism across the region."

The course ran in 2016 with more than 4,000 participants from over 100 countries and achieved a completion rate of 11.6 per cent, a high percentage compared to industry standards for MOOCs.

“The impressive amount of instructional material and the high level of the instructors allowed me to learn how to tell compelling stories with data from the comfort of my own home,” said Pablo Maderuelo, a journalist from Spain who joined the original run of the course.

“This course helped me to do things like look for physical sources, clean data and choose the right visualisation for that data … essential skills to tell a good story with numbers,” he said.

Maderuelo uses the skills and knowledge he learnt on the course to produce data stories for this website focusing on political, social and cultural issues.

Amaia Landaburu joined the course from India and produced this website about drought in the country as her final project for the MOOC.

Landaburu said that she followed the processes introduced by the course to collect and assess the reliability of data, then visualise it in interactive line charts, bar charts and pictograms.

Students can earn a free certificate for the course by completing all required assignments and last time 471 certificates were issued. Students who complete the project will also get the chance to showcase their work on the JMSC website as well as receive expert critique by the instructors.

To see a full overview of the course and instructors, click here. You can also watch a recording of a feedback session for the first run of the course held at Google’s office in Hong Kong here.

Register for the course by following these steps:

• Create an account in the JMSC MOOC portal.
• Wait for a confirmation in your email indicating that your account has been created. If you do not receive this, please check your spam folder.
• Return to mooc.jmsc.hku.hk, log in, then click this link for direct access to the course. A box will appear at the bottom asking if you want to enroll in the course. Click "Enroll me".

  You will be taken to the homepage of the course. We recommend you bookmark this page and mooc.jmsc.hku.hk for easy access to the course later.