News University, one of the fastest-growing sites for journalism electronic learning, is offering new resources to educators, including course guides with quizzes and assignments.

“Initially, NewsU was about professionals, but we wanted to reach out to the academic community,” said NewsU director Howard Finberg during a presentation Wednesday.

“We did this for two reasons. First, journalism students become journalists. We want to get them early. Secondly, teachers need help.”

NewsU is operated by The Poynter Institute, where Finberg is the director of interactive learning.

NewsU has more than 25 online modules geared toward college students and entry-level professionals. The modules include “Webinars,” online semi-synchronous courses that use instructors, and free self-directed classes.

Later this month, NewsU will release course guides, course progress reports and “seminar snapshots.” Written by professors, these companions to the online modules will feature discussion questions, quizzes and assignments teachers can incorporate into their courses.

Course progress reports give professors a chance to verify how much time a participant has spent on assignments. The report is sent via e-mail from the student to the professor through a secure system.

“This is huge,” said Dale Cressman, assistant professor of communications at Brigham

Young University and a NewsU user. “My biggest problem was tracking whether [students] did the work or not. They can’t cheat because the program times out when students stop interacting with it.”

The seminar snapshots will launch next week. The seminars, divided into nonlinear chapters, boil down 90-minute lectures into 15-minute videos devoted to specific topics.

In addition to the most popular courses, which include Cleaning Your Copy, The Lead Lab and Math for Journalists, Finberg said three new courses will be available soon. The new offerings are On the Beat: Covering Courts, International Reporting: Before You Go and Sound Storytelling: Using Audio.

So far, NewsU has received an outpouring of enthusiasm from the academic community.

“It gets to the point in your career when your students say ‘Oh, that’s just the professor,’ so I have to use other methods,” said Tim Lewis, associate professor at Lyndon State College in Vermont. “NewsU should help reinforce what I am telling them. It’s my job to let them know what information is available on the Internet.”

Lewis is also news director of LSC-TV News 7.

NewsU, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, measures its success with its rapid growth and positive feedback, Finberg said.

Most of its resources are free, requiring just a one-time registration. Launched in April 2005, it has a registered user base of 18,597 and is used in 157 countries, Finberg said. In user surveys, 72 percent found the courses extremely useful, and 80 percent said course content was helpful in their jobs, he said.

Finberg attributes NewsU’s success to three common threads: “Free, fun and flexible. It has been the only time in my career when getting three F’s was acceptable.”