project implementation

What we expect to do

Output

JOULE will design, develop and test a joint blended curriculum in DJ exploiting the partnership from different countries, disciplines and economic sectors (public/private) through:

  • The definition of core competencies profile for Data Journalists and for any citizen gathering and co-creating their story through the net to raise social awareness
  • The development of an e-learning environment for the online courses in data journalism, that will be available to the public free of charge through open licenses.
  • The introduction of an assessment and validation system, according with compliance requirements with the ECTS system.
  • The production of university teacher and student’s guidelines to Data Journalism in Europe, also to guarantee a high transferability of the learning outcomes

  • Data Journalism Profile

  • Open Courses

  • Validation Methods

  • High Transferability

JOULE attempts to meet five specific NEEDS

The training gap

Between the training of traditional journalists and the skills needed in the digital context. This gap is made visible in the days of the pandemic. The data in the newspapers are often different and journalists are not able to properly cope with them. People start not trusting the news about what is happening. Last but not least, data accessibility, analysis, visualization and reporting is an important skill to overcome the digital divide and to guarantee a well-designed news spreading.

The academic gap

Universities have various degrees in Data Science, few in Data Journalism. The final result is that nowadays on the one hand we have graduate students with strong technical skills in the fields of Big Data, Machine Learning, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, while on the other hand there are no graduate students with basic data skills that can be used within the journalistic and communication sector.

The standardization gap

In the Academic field there is not a well-defined academic curriculum on data journalism especially in Southern Europe. What are the competencies that a journalist has to acquire? What of those competencies come from the traditional journalism curriculum and what others from the technical one? A definition and a standardization of such a curriculum has to be handled in order to define a comprehensive competences profile.

The illiteracy gap

Citizens and students gather information from ‘the net’ without any competence to assess how they are manipulated by algorithms. The devastating effects are well-illustrated by former employees of Google, Facebook, Instagram in the Netflix documentary ‘The social Dilemma’. DJ shows not only how this works but also how we can counter these intrusions.

The democratic gap

JOULE will allow citizens to exercise their democratic rights, empower them to safeguard the EU democratic values, and at the same time understand the relevance of news in both social and more traditional media.