Course info

“Advanced Media Literacy Course” is an interactive, multilingual (English, Spanish and Serbian) online Moodle course about media literacy and critical thinking.

The course provides essential knowledge and skills on media literacy and critical thinking, required for understanding contemporary media and media content, as well as for understanding and interpreting messages that we receive and send via mass media. The participants will be familiarized with and introduced to the key concepts in the field of media and communication, and empowered and encouraged to take a critical, active citizen and socially responsible towards the contemporary media landscape. They will learn about the importance and influence of the media, their pervasiveness, the way that the messages are constricted and how they could be deconstructed, decoded and critically assessed in terms of quality, reliability, objectivity etc. and grasp the wider context in which the media function and the discourse they use to address the users/recipients...

The course will cover several larger areas of the media universe, each covering a number of different topics: Types of Media: Traditional vs. Social; Media Literacy and New Humanism as UNESCO’s emerging concepts; various meanings of media literacy; 5W + 1H – essential rules of responsible journalism (Who?, What?, When?, Where? and Why?, plus: How?); Find a Villain – How to analyse and critically read media messages?; The World in 30 Minutes: Constructing a TV News Lineup; Representation and Symbolism in the Media; Bias in the Media; Spin Doctors – What is Media Spinning?; fact-checking and fake news and how to recognize them (CRAP test), The Power of Media (a very short history of the mass media, investigative journalism and examples of the most influential cases in history of media – the Dreyfus affair, Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds, Watergate scandal, WikiLeaks, Panama papers); new media journalism...