Educator Resources

A newly expanded online resources for teachers and students

Created by the 2025-26 Academic Committee, this page will be your hub for example syllabi, assignments and other resources available only to IRE members.

Resources can be used for both college-level courses and newsroom training.

Current IRE members can also navigate to archive.ire.org to explore a new, much-improved search interface for the thousands of tipsheets, contest entries, conference audio files and other resources in the IRE database.

While we work on the site, you can find tipsheets, audio and other resources from recent conferences here.

Please note that this is an early release and new updates are regularly being made. Do you have feedback, need to report a problem or have feature requests? Send them to help@ire.org.

Syllabi Assignments and Lesson Plans Mentors FAQ

Syllabi

Syllabus category	Course length	Course number and title	School or org	Instructor	Course description
Data journalism	Semester	JOUR 322: Introduction to Investigative and Data Journalism	University of Southern California	Dana Chinn	Required course teaching research skills and basic Excel using the Washington Post Fatal Force dataset. Uses IRE's Numbers in the Newsroom by Sarah Cohen.

Assignments and Lesson Plans

Assignment or lesson plan	Topics	Skills	Assignment or lesson plan description	Assignment file	Suggested IRE Resource Center search terms or Resource ID numbers	Instructor notes	Course number and title	School or org	Instructor	Instructor email
Lesson plan	Crime rates	Excel	Rates and ratios in Excel		Crime rates, IRE Beat Book Understanding Crime and Justice Statistics		IRE NICAR Course Pack	IRE
Assignment	Crime rates	Excel	Practice: Rates for crime analysis	Crime2013.xls		Use crime data for your city or state if possible.	IRE NICAR Course Pack	IRE
Assignment	Jobs and internships		Anatomy of an investigative story: Network with a journalist by interviewing them about how they reported an in-depth or investigative story or series. If needed, connect with a journalist on the IRE Media Mentors site.			This assignment was conceived by the late Gary Cohn, a longtime IRE member.	JOUR 322: Introduction to Investigative and Data Journalism	University of Southern California	Dana Chinn	chinn@usc.edu
Lesson plan	U.S. Census, percent change	Excel	Role of the U.S. Census; calculating and interpreting absolute vs. relative change; rounding. In-class assignments: multiple-choice quiz; calculate absolute and relative change in population for states that gained and lost House seats.				JOUR 322: Introduction to Investigative and Data Journalism	University of Southern California	Dana Chinn	chinn@usc.edu

Mentors

FAQ

Topics	School or org	Instructor	Email
Beginning data journalism, NICAR Course Pack, Excel, Tableau	University of Southern California	Dana Chinn	chinn@usc.edu
Data in investigative reporting, R and Python, Datawrapper	Syracuse University	Nausheen Husain	nhusain@syr.edu
Investigative reporting, news organization partnerships	Boston University	Maggie Mulvihill	mmulvih@bu.edu

Educator Resources

A newly expanded online resources for teachers and students

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