Beebs College of Journalism to go live in December

Nearly five years ago the BBC launched a new virtual training service for its journalists called the BBC College of Journalism – or CoJo.

CoJo has evolved considerably since it first started but is basically a mixture of digital courses, face to face courses and information/best practice provided in the form of a blog and articles.

Their are focused exercises looking at things like writing that includes digital courses, videos, guides and advice from people within and outside the BBC.

There is also a very impressive, and fun, virtual newsroom application that throws story updates and tasks at you in quick order.

Well this incredible resource for BBC staff will be opened up to the wider British public on 14 December. It will be free for British users and under a subscription for people accessing it internationally.

The team behind the service have been busy “writing, editing, blogging” to get the content ready to launch the site to the wider public.

As well as the learning resources and blogs the team are also making use of feeds like twitter and delicious to pull in information from around the rest of the web.

According to Kevin Marsh of the team, there are currently around 2,500 pages within the site, a couple of hundred videos and dozens of virtual newsroom scenarios.

Once it has gone live I think this will quickly become an invaluable resource for journalists, bloggers, academics, students and even people sharing stories with their friends.

And hopefully it will be picked up and used by people contributing to message boards, comment systems and phone-ins as the libel courses would help make those platforms run more smoothly.

One to read

Story Curve: Emerging into the light