Best Teaching Practices

What to do with students who cheat

They are a challenge every journalism educator faces at some point -- students who cut and paste material from stories on the Internet; fabricate quotes; or pad bibliographies and source lists. In this thoughtful piece, Alex Gillis, a journalism instructor at Ryerson, describes his first experience with cheating students and what he learned from it. He outlines some of the surprising things he found out about why students cheat (it's often the best students who cheat in an effort to get an A) and what can be done to try to stop them. The article includes links to resources from Canadian universities that may be helpful to any educator determined to stop their students from cheating.

A reflective model for teaching journalism

This is a conference paper prepared for the first JourNet international conference on Professional Education for the Media that took place in Newcastle, Australia, in 2004. The paper outlines a model that uses critical reflection as a bridge between journalism theory and professional practice.

Teaching journalism via computer games

Two university professors in Minnesota are using a graphically-sophisticated computer game, produced by a Canadian gaming company, in which the students transform the medieval wizards and rogues into news editors, reporters, and other modern characters. They roleplay their way through a major news event.