School Stops For The Summer: Learning Never Should by Wesley Fryer (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Stay busy this summer learning new skills and information with these online courses:

• Introduction to Journalism – Learn about the key principles and debates in journalism and enact the role of a journalist in the context of an escalating story.

Topics include include news writing, opinion writing, feature writing, investigative journalism and politics reporting. Offered by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, through FutureLearn. Courses are free and begin on September 29.

• Metadata: Organising and Discovering Information – This course describes how Metadata is used as an information tool for the Web, for databases, and for the software and computing applications around us.

This free Coursera MOOC focuses on metadata, a tool that enables the information age functions performed by humans as well as those performed by computers, and approaches metadata from the perspective of Information Science, a field that studies how people create and manage information. Starts July 14.

•  The Life Cycle of an Investigative Story: Master Class - senior reporter at the New York Times will explain investigative journalism from idea to publication.

Poynter's News University will offer a broadcast hosted by David Barstow, who will explain the way he writes narrative, character-rich pieces even on stories that seem like they wouldn’t lend themselves to narrative. It will also cover how to write narrative and character-rich stories. The course will take place at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Aug. 1. Registration is ongoing and costs US$99.

• Digital journalism – in Spanish – about improving multimedia skills, producing audio, video, and written work for the web.

Offered by the University of Guadalajara in Mexico will offer a five-week course in September. Course will be available online Sept. 1 to Oct. 5. Registration fee is MXN1,200 for participants in Mexico and US$120 for participants outside the country. Deadline to register is Aug. 17.

• Introduction to Mobile Journalism – the latest in the mobile media landscape and how journalism can be done via the mobile phone.

Offered from the Knight Center, to get students up to speed on every layer of how mobile is affecting journalism including the latest best practices in mobile reporting, design, product development, audience research, trends and future mobile/wearable tech. The free course will take place from June 30 to Aug. 3.

• Linkedin for Journalists - Tutorial on using this social networking site as a journalistic resource.

The free session will take place July 21 at 12:30 p.m. (EDT), participants must be a member of Linkedin (free) to register.

• Creativity, Innovation, and Change – in English and Chinese – ideas to drive your creative potential

This course takes an experiential learning approach to driving creative change. Offered by Coursera, this free MOOC runs from July 14 to Sept 1st.

Some of these resources were found thanks to the ijnet website.