Are you looking for a basic online primer on fact-checking and verification? Hands-On Fact-Checking: A Short Course was created by the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute and the American Press Institute, and funded by the Google News Initiative.

Designed for college students as a self-directed course or as a resource for classroom instructors, the approximately 90-minute course is meant to be a very practical guide to some of the most important skills that fact-checkers use in their everyday work. By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. Determine what makes a fact-checkable claim
2. Distinguish between sources on the basis of their reliability
3. Stress-test spreadsheets in order to determine whether they can be used to support a factual claim
4. Quickly deploy basic verification skills

Each of the sections in this course has several activities meant to help learn by doing. For instance, the first section of the course requires students to watch three short videos of speeches by Heads of State at the United Nations' General Assembly and detect the fact-checkable claims within them.



You can take the course for free on Poynter's News University.