The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas recently registered its 5,000th student in an online training course, marking a major milestone for its pioneering distance education program.

Since 2003, the Knight Center has offered journalists 91 online courses in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, reaching students in every country in Latin America, and most nations of the Caribbean.

Classes typically last from four to eight weeks and are taught entirely online through the Knight Center’s innovative platform built on Moodle, an open-source course management system. They feature video lectures, chats, discussion forums, quizzes, and other collaborative learning technologies.

The Knight Center has received major funding since 2002 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, enabling the center to create and expand its distance education program.

"The online courses have proved to be an ideal system to teach journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the appetite for these courses is tremendous," says Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center. "When journalists from different countries in Latin America are united by their interest in training, this ends up creating an interesting chemistry, a bond of community formation that can last and generate positive results."

Since 2003, the Knight Center has worked with 16 instructors to offer online courses and webinars from their homes in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and the United States. Students include reporters, editors, and producers for print, broadcast, and online media.

See here for more information about the Knight Center's online courses.