<p>Mothers of the digital era, as their children’s media educators, need to acquire media literacy skills more than ever. Despite the importance of media literacy training for mothers, there has been limited research in this field. Therefore, this study aimed to compare the effectiveness of Self- Paced Learning (SPL) and Community of Inquiry (CoI) methods in teaching media literacy to Iranian mothers. Ninety mothers of 5th-grade elementary school boys in Hamedan city were selected using an available sampling method and randomly assigned to three groups: control, SPL, CoI. The SPL and CoI groups were trained using the adobe connect learning management system over eight 90 minutes’ sessions, while the control group did not receive any training. A media literacy questionnaire, covering the dimensions of use and consumption, analysis, critique, and creation, was used to collect data before and after the intervention. Despite the lack of significant differences in pre-test data analysis (<i>P</i> &gt; 0.05), post-test data analysis using one-way variance analysis and Bonferroni ‘s post hoc test showed that both the CoI and SPL had a significant effect compared to the control group (P &lt; 0.001). Moreover, the CoI was significantly more effective than the SPL (P &lt; 0.001). This difference was significant across the four dimensions of media literacy: use and consumption, analysis, critique, and creation of media messages (P &lt; 0.001). Based on these findings, it is suggested that problem-based and community-oriented pedagogies should be prioritized by theorists and instructional designers in online media literacy teaching.</p>