CQU’s Professor Alan Knight and PhD student Ali Abusalem, based in Melbourne, will share the CQU experience of teaching journalism online at one of the largest Middle Eastern journalism conferences this month.

The only Australian university to be accepted to present at the Conference, CQU will headline the Online Journalism in the Arab World: Realities and Challenges Conference at the University of Sharjah, on November 22 and 23.

Mr Abusalem said they hoped to promote CQU’s e-learning approach to journalism and also to attract students from the region.

“CQU uses the Internet to research, deliver, develop and demonstrate multimedia journalism. The Internet’s reach and flexibility allows professional education to be tailored to the needs of practitioners, who do not need to attend a central location to learn.”.

Mr Abusalem said many journalists learned their profession on the job, which he believed did not usually address future best practices.

He believed CQU’s e-journalism program offered a more innovative approach to journalism education which intended to impart practices that would be highly regarded by media world-wide.

The emerging researcher has just returned from the 14th AMIC annual conference in Beijing, Media and Society in Asia: Transformations and Transitions, where he presented papers on the use of television as a catalyst of democratisation and on reporting translated scripts.

“The papers created an enormous interest from the conference floor and led to invitations to New Zealand and German media conferences, as well as 3 invitations to publish my research in international journals,” Mr Abusalem said.

Mr Abusalem said his PhD thesis on 'Pan-Arab Satellite Television Phenomenon: A Catalyst of Democratisation and Cultural, Social and Political Change' will be published as a book on completion of his studies.