Digital Media Literacy
Online Course for Adult Educators
Combating Online Misinformation to Prevent Radicalisation of Vulnerable Adults
Erasmus+ Project # 2025-1-NL01-KA220-ADU-000358363
What will you gain from this course?
Misinformation is not only about false information. It is also about how we think, what we feel, whom we trust, and how we interact with others. This course gives adult educators practical knowledge and tools to understand these processes and address misinformation in their own educational practice.
Through practical examples, interactive activities and digital tools, you will learn how to:
- Recognise different forms of misinformation across social media, news, images and other digital environments.
- Understand why people believe and share false information, including the role of cognitive biases, emotions and social influence.
- Use practical verification and AI-supported tools to investigate questionable information and support learning.
- Facilitate constructive conversations about controversial or polarising topics without reinforcing division.
- Design engaging learning activities using reflection, discussion and gamification to strengthen critical thinking and resilience to misinformation.
- Support and assess learners’ digital competences using approaches aligned with DigCompEdu.
By the end of the course, you will have both a stronger understanding of the psychology and social dynamics of misinformation and practical methods that you can use with adult learners, volunteers and community groups.
Course Modules
1. Disinformation Techniques
- Explore different types of misinformation and disinformation and the political, economic and ideological motives behind them.
- Learn how propaganda techniques, emotional appeals, visual manipulation, memes and storytelling can influence beliefs and behaviour.
- Discover how social media algorithms, filter bubbles, echo chambers, influencers and bots shape today’s information environment.
2. Cognitive Biases
- Explore how cognitive biases influence the way people process misinformation.
- Learn how confirmation bias, familiarity and anchoring shape judgments and beliefs.
- Discover how cognitive shortcuts, the illusion of truth and cognitive fluency can make false information seem credible.
- Understand mechanisms of selective attention, false memories and memory distortion.
3. Emotions and Belief
- Explore how emotions influence the spread of misinformation.
- Understand why content that triggers fear, anger, disgust or moral outrage is more likely to go viral.
- Learn how affective polarisation and populist narratives can deepen social divisions.
- Discover practical emotion-regulation and reflection techniques to respond more critically to misleading content.
4. Social Identity and Trust
- Explore how social identity and group dynamics influence belief in misinformation.
- Learn how polarisation, echo chambers and communities shape what people see, trust and share.
- Discover the role of peer networks, influencers and social trust in spreading information.
- Examine how narratives and moral framing make disinformation a tool for social division.
5: Combating Disinformation
- Learn practical strategies to prevent and counter misinformation through prebunking, debunking and Inoculation Theory.
- Develop skills to evaluate source credibility, identify manipulated content and detect deepfakes.
- Explore how to integrate media and digital literacy into non-formal adult education.
- Understand how EU policies and online platforms address transparency, misinformation and algorithmic accountability.