Twenty-sixth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

Fake news is an increasingly popular topic of conversation in the public sphere and academia, due to the increasingly far-reaching impact of social media and the shifting political climate. Promoting information and media literacy by providing opportunities for students to evaluate issues and analyze the underlying factors that influence public perception, is necessary for the development of an informed citizenry. However, limited data exist on how teaching faculty deal with the issue of fake news in the classroom, as well as for their own research needs. In light of this, the researches designed and distributed an online mixed methods survey aimed at investigating how faculty at California State University, Northridge, deal with the phenomenon of fake news. In the survey, faculty were asked to define fake news, comment on the impact of fake news on their discipline, how they addressed it in their classroom and the various tools and techniques used to do so. The resulting data analysis demonstrated that teaching faculty take a variety of different approaches to confront this issue while revealing that there is little consensus on the best or most effective means to do so.