Every day I get tons of spam e-mails sent to my inbox from various things I was signed up for during my Journalism courses. I have the Wall Street Journal asking me to buy another subscription, the National Press Photographers Association offering me another year of student membership, and many newsletters from the Poynter Institute.

But one e-mail caught my interest today. “Sign Up Now for the Webinar [Web Seminar] ‘Mobile Apps: Expanding Your Reach and Audience!’” 
And I thought, “You know, that could be useful for a digital historian, too.”
When I clicked to view the description of the course there was a list off to the right of other course titles that were open free to me:

• HTML5 Essentials for Content Creators
• Open APIs in Action: Your Website and Your Content
• Describing Your Content: Metadata and What It’s Good For
• Mobile and Multimedia Essential Tools Series
• Mobile 101: Producing News on Your Smart Phone (This one was created by UCF instructor Rick Brunson! My old teacher!) 
•  SEO and Online Headline Training Package
• 10 Things You Can Do For Free On Your Website
• Moving From Print to Web Design: 5 Things You Need To Know

I realized that many of this free self-directed courses or web seminar series could easily benefit my Digital Media and Public History course as well. Even though they are generally geared towards journalism students, HTML codes, web content and metadata are all topics we’ve touched on in my history course as well. 

Poynter offers literally thousands of courses, but we could easily narrow it to strictly online multimedia or media audiences/convergence topics only.

I know my membership with Poynter was free and has lasted about two years now, but I am not sure what it would take for the entire class to gain membership- whether it would be done through the school or not. But these seem like such useful tools that we could easily bring into the classroom just on our laptops. And I know from experience these courses are generally very quick. (We used to knock out two to three editing and grammar sections a night for my Editing I class.) 

I just have to wonder if my classmates would be interested in these sorts of series. Any feedback, classmates?