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
Learning Objectives
This course:
- Builds educators’ digital self-efficacy, enabling them to use verification tools confidently.
- Enhances psychological literacy, helping them understand and teach about bias and emotion.
- Strengthens social cohesion, fostering inclusive dialogue and resilience against polarization.
Educators thus become facilitators of digital critical thinking and agents of democratic resilience.
Upon completion of the course, educators will:
- Identify misinformation across multiple media contexts.
- Understand the cognitive, emotional, and social processes of belief in falsehoods.
- Integrate AI-supported, reflective, and gamified teaching tools into their practice.
- Design inclusive learning activities that enhance critical and democratic competences.
- Assess and support learners’ progress using digital instruments aligned with DigCompEdu.
Course Modules
1. Disinformation Techniques
- Typology of Disinformation: Political, economic, and ideological motives behind manipulation.
- Propaganda Techniques: Repetition, appeal to emotion, visual manipulation, memes, emotional storytelling as persuasion tools.
- Information Ecosystems: Algorithms, filter bubbles, echo chambers, influencers, bots.
2. Cognitive Biases
- Cognitive Biases in Information Processing: Confirmation bias, familiarity, and anchoring bias.
- Heuristics and Pattern Recognition: The illusion of truth and cognitive fluency
- Attention and Memory Distortion: False memory, selective attention and misinformation persistence.
3. Emotions and Belief
- Emotional Triggers and Viral Dynamics: Fear, anger, disgust, and moral outrage boost virality.
- Affective Polarisation: Populist narratives and “us vs. them” framing.
- Emotion Regulation: Reflective techniques to recognise emotional manipulation.
4. Beliefs and Social Identity
- Social Identity and Group Dynamics: Polarisation, identity and echo-chambers.
- Social Capital and Trust: peer-based information sources; influencers, micro-communities, and online tribes.
- Narratives and Moral Framing: Disinformation as a social bonding mechanism.
5: Combating Disinformation
- Pre-bunking and Debunking: Evaluating credibility and detecting deepfakes; Inoculation Theory;
- Media and Digital Competences: Integrating critical digital literacy into non-formal education.
- Policy and Platform-Based Approaches: EU policies on transparency and algorithm accountability.