Portuguese Podcasting Course Attracts Students from 58 Countries
- Aug 4, 2026
Podcasting has exploded in Brazil, the country with the highest number of podcast users globally.
So when Moody College of Communication’s Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas teamed up with the Brazilian podcasting production company Rádio Novelo to offer a free online course in Portuguese this May, the response was overwhelming.
The four-week course, “Telling stories in audio with Rádio Novelo,” attracted 7,228 students from 58 countries ranging from Brazil to Italy to Mozambique.
This is the highest number of participants for any single-language course offered by the Knight Center in the history of its Journalism Courses initiative, a distance learning program that offers online courses for journalists for free or at a low cost.
“The success of this course and the high level of engagement of the participants with Rádio Novelo's instructors are a testament to the enormous appetite among journalists to learn how to tell stories in new formats,” said Professor Rosental Calmon Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center, “and proof that the Knight Center's online courses program, which has trained more than 370,000 students since 2012, remains a powerful way to build learning communities of journalists around the world.”
Participants learned how to identify and develop a story idea, investigate and research material, structure stories for production and develop their script-writing skills. Rádio Novelo President Branca Vianna said the course was a “great experience” for the organization, as well.
When Rádio Novelo entered the podcasting scene in Brazil in 2019, its miniseries were very popular, but they required a lot of time and money to produce, said course instructors Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and Paula Scarpin. The free course was a way to offer that learning opportunity to more people.
“Now that the Brazilian public has discovered the power of narrative audio journalism, an ever-growing number of people are eager to tell stories in this format,” Thomson-DeVeaux and Scarpin said. “We have observed that our thousands of students come from incredibly diverse backgrounds and intend to apply the techniques learned in the course to a myriad of formats — ranging from traditional journalism to science communication.”
To learn more, read the full story on the Knight Center website.
