"Aside from on-site workshops-, says Gerda Meuer, Managing Director of DW Akademie, "the Internet - especially Facebook and Twitter - lends itself to training opportunities for bloggers and citizen journalists." DW Akademie is testing how eLearning and social media outlets can successfully be combined for shared learning and teaching based on the massive open online course (MOOC) concept. MOOCs are a new educational format currently being widely discussed, especially in higher education circles.

DW Akademie's Open Media Summit has involved experts from the region and developed the course based on their expertise. "We expect the Internet activists to actively contribute to the educational progress of the participants with their input," says Meuer describing the idea behind the project. "Our intention is to bring together the knowledge from the region and pass it on."

The OMS 2012 is part of a larger project to provide support and training to social media activists from the region and is conducted jointly with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) with funding by Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is the first project of its kind in media- development activities for the Arab world and ties into Deutsche Welle's longstanding commitment to online activists and citizen journalists.


In 2004, Deutsche Welle initiated the annual Deutsche Welle Blog Awards - The BOBs - and was the first broadcaster in the country to launch its own YouTube channels and Facebook pages.