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Piloting of the “Get Your Facts Straight” online training in Romania

The coronavirus isolated us for a while and forced us to face unprecedented situations. The recent message from the World Health Organization was very clear: The success of humanity in managing effectively the situations caused by Coronavirus depends on the actions taken by each organization, institution or person in the next period.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, spread in addition to the disease itself caused what the World Health Organization called infodemic. Infodemic is a compound term, derived from two other words: information and pandemic, that is defined as the suffocating abundance of true and false, contradictory and emotionally disturbing information about the new Coronavirus, that affected the globe in early 2020.

In this context, a lot of disinformation and fake news has been circulating in the online environment, especially on social media. Based on all the above-mentioned issues, EOS Foundation created an online training within the project “Get Your Facts Straight”. In this course there are many examples extracted from Coronavirus infodemic.

The online course was created on the Moodle platform, which is one of the most used platforms for e-learning courses due to its good functionalities. EOS Foundation has opted for this type of training because even if people spend now more time online, sometimes is very difficult for everybody to participate for example in a range of webinars which are running at a certain hour. Moodle platform allows participants to access the course at any time and to complete it in their own pace.

#GYFS online training was organized on Moodle platformThe course is structured in three workshops, with a final evaluation task. Each workshop has some theoretical notions in the form of presentations, several interactive approaches and resources. With very few exceptions, in the slides of the presentations there are links to follow some press articles or online tools that help to deepen the theoretical knowledge.

Also, the training content comprises informative videos, embedded webinars content, infographic images, quizzes and tests in order to evaluate the knowledge acquired by students regarding the disinformation. 75 participants registered until mid-June for the course and more people continue to sign up every day. Participants were encouraged by tutors to use the Forum section of Moodle training in order to ensure the interactivity within the platform and to connect with the other students for the exchange of information and ideas. All students will be awarded with a participation certificate when they complete the course and pass the final assessment test.

Text and photos: EOS Foundation


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This project is co-funded by Preparatory action "Media literacy for all" of the European Commission DG CNECT. Grant Agreement: LC-01249049