Writing and Disseminating Grey Literature

Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) via Coursera

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Details

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

1 day 2 hours 7 minutes
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Intermediate
Subtitles

English, Portuguese, Kazakh, German, Hindi, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Greek, Italian, French, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Thai, Ukrainian, Japanese, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch, Turkish

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Overview

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A self-paced course from IIHS designed to help academics and practitioners find a wider audience for their grey literature outputs—reports, working papers, evaluations and policy documents. Grey literature represents an enormous body of knowledge, much of which is not read beyond the immediate commissioning audience; the problem is not a lack of rigour—it is a lack of tools and techniques for reaching diverse communities. Writing and Disseminating Grey Literature gives researchers, academics, and development professionals practical tools for articulating grey literature to make it accessible to non-specialist readers, and for building dissemination strategies for digital, print, and multimedia channels to make valuable knowledge widely available. Across nine modules, this course covers how to structure documents for different audiences, write accessibly without sacrificing rigour, adapt content for different channels and formats, and develop a dissemination plan for research outputs. You should enrol, if you are: • A researcher, academic, or student • A development sector professional or practitioner • An NGO or think-tank staff member • A communications officer in a research organisation Why you should enrol: As funders and institutions increasingly ask researchers to demonstrate public impact, the ability to translate rigorous work into accessible formats has become a critical professional skill. This course addresses that gap. By the end of the course, you will: • Be familiar with the landscape of grey literature, and the public-facing formats that can give it a wider reach: data stories, photo narratives, opinion pieces, and infographics • Gain practical, hands-on methods for crafting each of these formats • Know how to pitch your work to media outlets and publications • Understand how to use social media strategically to build visibility for your publications and connect with broader audiences

Syllabus

Welcome to the Course

Hi, we are glad you’ve joined this course on writing and disseminating grey literature! There are nine modules, with six core modules and an assignment module, that have been designed to help you finish this course in six to eight weeks. In each of these modules, you will discover how you can draw from your research or practice/industry work to write public-facing content such as op-eds, data stories, photo narratives, and infographics. You will learn useful skills to help you develop your writing and editing skills, pitch your ideas successfully to media outlets, and use social media to disseminate your work better. This first introductory module serves as an orientation to what you can expect from this course and how you can best approach it. Take a few moments to meet the course instructors, your peers, and also to introduce yourself.

The Basics: Overview of Grey Literature and Public Pieces

This first module will give you an overview of what constitutes grey literature and introduce the different types of public pieces you could produce from your research. We will then take you through how you could go about structuring and outlining your arguments before you craft a public piece, and what you need to keep in mind when you pitch your work to a publication.

Express Yourself: Crafting an Opinion Piece (Op-ed)

This module will focus on writing opinion pieces or op-eds – one type of public writing we had introduced in Week 1. We will first explain what an op-ed is and how it can be a useful resource for researchers and practitioners to communicate their work to a larger audience. We will then, in detail, cover how you can structure an op-ed and pitch it successfully, and how it varies from a piece of grey literature you may be more used to writing.

Numbers are Awesome: Using Data to Tell a Story

This module delves into another popular form of public writing – data stories. Discover what data stories are and how to build compelling narratives, choose relevant information and adapt your writing to suit this style. This module ends with an overview on how to create infographics to present data from your research.

Put Your Phone Camera to Work: Telling a Photo Narrative

This module will guide you to use the visual medium of a photo narrative to tell stories. You will learn how to identify when it's suitable to opt for this style of public writing, how to plan a narrative using photographs and how to use a smartphone to click photos while you’re out on the field.

Using Social Media to Drive Readership

This module will build on the lessons covered in the previous ones. You will learn about social media and how you can use it effectively to widen the reach of your publications, find potential collaborators and connect with others working in areas of research related to yours. We will focus on Twitter and Instagram and how you can adapt your writing to suit these two platforms.

Editing Your Own Work

The previous modules looked at how to outline, structure and build different types of public writing from scratch. To end this course, we will take you through the different stages of editing. You will learn why it’s important for you to edit your own work and how you can go about it in an organised step-by-step manner.

Course Assignment

A chance to test yourself, and put what you've learned to work! The assignment requires you to select from amongst the three options, craft and submit your work which will be graded by your peers, and gives you the opportunity to participate in peer-learning by grading the work of your peers as well. All the best! Note that you are required to submit only one of the three options for your assignment. While you are welcome to attempt and submit more than one, the requirement for course completion is the successful completion of one assignment.