And their course page went viral:
Useful? Stupid? Would you take it if you were a student? 
Itâs an idea thatâs been in the air. In fact, my D17 proposed essentially this course in one of her honors applications (in response to a prompt asking for the most important course a college student should take), and I strongly suspect she wasnât the only applicant who came up with such an idea.
NPR interviewed one of the professors. Iâm not convinced the theme is so original, just the current context makes it seem more relevant or prescient to people who donât normally pay attention to disinformation, propaganda and Pravda.
Of course the idea is not 100% original, but the implementation probably is. Biostats students are taught to spot fake data, but who wants to register for a boring course?
I took a very similar course in graduate school over 20 years ago. However, that course was titled âcritical readingâ, therefore it did not make the headlines 
I do agree that this should be a required course for all journalists who write about science. I stopped reading popular science sections years ago because I was afraid that reading some of these gems may cause a hypertensive crisis.
This is the way do to this course properly, but it requires advanced math skills.
http://www.mmss.northwestern.edu/undergraduate/program-overview/
The idea may not be new, but the urgency is.
At a national scientific conference I attended last May, one of the sessions for patients and caregivers was how to sort reliable from questionable medical info. It was taught by UCSZf medical librarian.
I think this is a skill that is urgently needed everywhere.
^^ True, librarians have been working on this for decades, under the umbrella of information literacy.
I agree totally, it is also why there are so many out there who put critical reasoning and thinking curricula up there as âdangerous teachingâ (put a lot of politicians on that list as well as a lot of people). Sometimes all it takes is reading something then googling the supposed source, or googling the idea behind the âarticleâ and seeing if everything that comes up cites the thing you are reading,which is a sign it is bogus if everything cites one source. They used to teach courses like this with advertising (for example, when an ad for that miracle pill that flattens you belly magically says it was âscientifically formulatedâ (like, what the heck does that mean?) or âclinically provenâ (again, what does that mean? A lot of people sadly will assume âClinically provenâ means it was vetted via statistical or trials (note these are usually called clinical trials, which the ad leaves off, since that would be legally actionable as a false claim). There are all kinds of words that should raise hackles, but donât in many readers, and sadly few people have been taught to look for them. Few people, too, have read what experts on language like Chomsky and others have written, specifically about the nature of slogans and how they manipulate the person (classic example âSupport the TroopsââŠfew people want bad things to happen to our troops, and want them to have what they need to do the job, but this gets stretched to being âif you donât support sending troops to do X, you arenât supporting the troopsâ, this was a classic line during several wars the US has fought in recent decadesâŠmeanwhile someone opposing the war could be fighting to save the lives of those who would be sent to fight it).
There is a reason why people are reading and re-reading 1984, a world where critical thinking is literally illegal and where new speak is basically turning, to paraphrase the book âTruth is fiction, fiction is truthâ.
In my freshman comp course, we are doing units on media literacy and science literacy. I think the explosion of available news sourcesâreal, fake, satirical, conspiracy theorizing, and every other iterationâhas produced awareness of the need for this kind of training. Itâs not strongly developed for a lot of people. Trying to keep it non-political, for instance, we read about the Sandy Hook hoaxers, and how much people are willing to believe that never happened. Frightening,
Should be taught at K-12 level:
âIn my freshman comp course, we are doing units on media literacy and science literacy. I think the explosion of available news sourcesâreal, fake, satirical, conspiracy theorizing, and every other iterationâhas produced awareness of the need for this kind of training. Itâs not strongly developed for a lot of people. Trying to keep it non-political, for instance, we read about the Sandy Hook hoaxers, and how much people are willing to believe that never happened. Frightening,â
For way too many people, liberals and conservatives alike, curing selective perception would require a brain surgery rather than taking a college course.