Welcome to Analyzing Media Messages: Bias, Motivation and Production Choices. Being able to understand the media that we consume is an essential skill for all students – and teachers, and really everyone – to have in this complex, media-filled world. This course will give you the tools you need to analyze and gain a deeper understanding of all kinds of media… and teach your students to do the same. 

Why Take this Course?

• You want to be able to make informed choices about the media you consume 
• You want to understand how media production choices can impact their audiences
• You are interested in being a better media producer

Whatever your level of interest, in this course we’ll guide you through how to conduct a critical media analysis and connect that to your teaching objectives. 

More About This Course

This course is divided into lessons that are a combination of text, images, videos and other interactive elements. You will also be asked to complete two assignments: creating media analysis on a topic of your choosing and a lesson plan teaching your students to do their own analyses.

 Your instructors' recommendations will align with the “Analysis and Evaluation” KQED media literacy competency. Exemplary media literacy educators demonstrate the following with regards to analyzing media:

1. Ability to analyze and evaluate media across formats, especially with respect to how production choices influence media messages. 
2. Critically examine how the media creator’s bias, purpose, intended audience and authority impact a media piece’s credibility, form and message.
3. Critically examine how media is constructed (i.e. production techniques, frame of reference, portrayal of people and places, visual design, image manipulation, etc.) and how those elements contribute to the way media is understood and acted upon. 
4. Understand that AI is trained using large data sets and that this data, by its nature, contains a variety of biases that persist in results from GenAI tools. Use this knowledge to critically examine outputs from GenAI tools for bias related to topics such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and country of origin. 

In addition, other educators may view and comment on your submission, which many course participants have found helpful. We encourage you to do the same.

You can go through the course at whatever pace makes sense for you, and review anything afterwards that you might have missed. In order to receive a certificate of completion, you will need to complete all the assignments and finish the course within four weeks of starting it. If you don’t finish in time, no worries, you can always re-enroll.