Activity Design for Cultivating Students’ Journalistic Skills and Inquiry-Mind in a Blended Learning Environment

Developing students’ journalistic skills online is a big challenge in the field of journalism education. In addition, inquiry-mind is an important critical thinking disposition to write better news reports. The purpose of this study was to examine how to design a course to cultivate students’ journalistic skills and inquiry-mind in a blended learning environment based on a case study. This research was conducted in a Japanese university course, called “Internet Journalism in Practice”. The authors conducted Participant Observation to identify the interactions between the lecturer and students and administered questionnaires to clarify whether the course fostered students’ inquiry-mind. The authors identified that the following five design elements were important in the blended learning environments. These elements were: (1) visualization of scaffolding of news reports writing, (2) surprising game experience, (3) role-playing as journalists in a team, (4) situational support of critical thinking and writing techniques and (5) encouraging students’ active participation on challenging assignments online after they reached a higher level of journalistic skills and critical thinking. In addition, the challenge of using the five design elements during the COVID-19 pandemic was discussed. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.