On Tuesday,Facebook announced new online courses for journalists. The free global courses will focus on three core pillars of the news cycle: discovering content, creating stories, and building an audience. To access these courses, you'll need to link your Facebook account to Exceed LMS, the third-party learning management system that powers Blueprint.
According to the report of The Tech Portal, the free course offered by Facebook won’t exactly equip joiners with the skills to work at newspapers, magazines, or other journals. The course is focused towards using Facebook products for spreading the word around.
"Next to Facebook guidelines and instructions, we're also taking great examples from the industry itself," said Aine Kerr, manager of journalism partnerships at Facebook.
Accompanying with best practices and guidelines, the Facebook courses include How Journalists Can Best Utilize Facebook and Instagram and courses on different products such as the Facebook Live, 360 videos and& photos, and Instant Articles. Additional to that are the guides and modules upon getting started on Facebook and growing your presence. The course will start from the very basics and takes you through the circles that are a must to become an effective Facebook advertiser.
Facebook has also planned to launch webinars that aim the people, specifically the joiners, in different roles like newsgatherer, content creator, or audience engagement specialist. The first one, on Thursday, November 3, is about using Facebook Live at 1-2pm ET. In this workshop for beginners and intermediate users, FB will cover the basics of how to go live as well as current best practices for journalists using Live.
The resources currently available take around 15 minutes to complete. To access them, journalists need to log into the Blueprint platform with their Facebook accounts. Facebook will be expanding its training by introducing webinars and translating its existing courses into different languages in the coming months.
