COPE - Covering Cohesion Policy in Europe

Over the past 1,5 years, the COPE consortium has built a 27-country Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) teaching coverage of EU issues to journalism students across Europe. The MOOC addresses journalism educators and institutes across Europe as well as newsrooms and individual journalists looking for training options.

The MOOC – produced by journalism institutes in 27 EU member states – will help journalism students understand policy-making in Europe and tap on relevant data and sources. The COPE MOOC is available in all EU languages. Selected modules have so-called “local windows” providing country-specific contents. The consortium shares one goal – promoting even more cross-border collaboration and professional coverage of European issues in a future generation of European journalists. The COPE MOOC is co-funded by the European Union with a budget of 1 Mio. Euro to facilitate the production of content of all 14 modules, the translation, and the technical set-up of 27 national MOOCs.

This E-Book gathers all contents provided in the COPE MOOC, to make the teaching materials accessible to journalism educators, journalism students and media practitioners beyond the digital version. We hope this E-Book will inspire creative use of our materials in teaching across Europe – and beyond!

A comprehensive set of 14 modules (one semester) will enable journalism educators across the EU to systematically teach journalism students to better understand the functioning of EU institutions and the complex factual dimensions of Cohesion Policy in the EU. Journalism students will also learn how to practically translate this knowledge into sound and sensitive, yet critical and challenging multimedia reporting techniques addressing local audiences. Our course will make a special effort to train journalism students in finding the regional angle in EU coverage, to make coverage relevant for local audiences, and act as watchdog to cover and assess the spending of cohesion funds by local actors in the regions across the EU.

Journalism educators will be substantially supported by experienced scholars (from the field of political science, mainly public policy and European studies) dealing with Cohesion Policy and EU policies in general, both in the process of preparation of the course modules and the implementation of the curriculum. Thus, an interdisciplinary approach is key for this project.

Please download the English language version of the training material here