This is the second time the course has been offered, and there are updated course materials as well as a new platform.

This weekend the Center for Digital Journalism will start offering a five-week online course called "The Challenge and Opportunities of Digital Journalism" for 48 participants. 

There are two sections of the class, one of practicing journalism professionals and one of professors at the University of Guadalajara, where the Center is based.

Just one year after giving this course for the first time, I found I had to locate updated source materials because many things had changed. For example, the debate about citizen journalists, which used to focus on whether they were qualified to publish, has evolved into a discussion of how to make effective use of their contributions.

In addition, Twitter was often viewed as a curious toy by many journalists and now is considered an important publishing and newsgathering tool.

The course´s five units are:

• The end of the monopoly and the collapse of the media in the U.S. and Europe

• The state of digital media in Latin America today

• Innovations in Latin American media outlets, and examples of multimedia reporting

• New business models for news in Latin America

• Managing a digital news operation at a traditional news outlet

Each week the participants will be asked to review articles and videos, write analyses of them and engage in online conversations about the assigned topics.

The sixth part of the course will be a three-day in-person practical training session on the use of digital publishing tools, which will take place in Guadalajara in March.

I´m teaching the online portion and we will be using multimedia publishing experts to teach the in-person portion.

Among other innovations this year is our move to a new distance-learning platform, called Moodle, which is used all over the world. Moodle offers more flexibility than the one we had been using here at the university.