Several questions arose in the comments to the post I wrote yesterday about the multimedia course syllabus. To answer some of those questions, I’m creating a FAQ (although they aren’t really “frequently asked” questions at this point). Hopefully, this additional information will be useful to you. If anyone has further questions, I’ll answer them as I can. Check below the fold. #

#

Q. Where in the sequence does this course come in? Does this course replace something else in the core curriculum? If so, what? It’s easy to see why a course such as this should be a requirement. It’s more difficult to figure out what to drop to make room for it. #

A. Eastern Illinois’ journalism curriculum is based on a “core” of required courses, and “tracks,” in which students can focus on a specific area of interest (graphics, photojournalism, online journalism, print writing, etc.). Rather than delete a core course, the faculty decided to reduce the number of hours required for a concentration from 15 hours to 12 hours to make room for the 3-hour multimedia journalism class. The revised core, in order the students should take them, is as follows: #

• Journalism & Democracy (intro course)
• News Writing
• Introduction to Visual Communication
• Introduction to Multimedia Journalism
• Introduction to Copy Editing
• Advanced Reporting and Research
• Journalism Practicum
• Journalism Ethics
• Communication Law

Under this course schedule, students should be enrolled in multimedia journalism at least by the second semester of their sophomore year if they start taking courses as a freshman. They could take the multimedia course in the first semester of their sophomore year if they take the newswriting and visual communication courses at the same time in their freshman year. #

Q. Do you plan on having a course website with tutorials, examples, related background information, etc.? It’d be a great resource for other j-students at universities w/o a multimedia course to come to and learn. #

A. We will definitely have a course web site. I’ll likely be spending some time this summer planning what it will look like. I’ve seen several online journalism courses that have great supplemental web sites, and I’ll be leaning on these examples for help. I will likely also be trying to experiment with some social networking sites. If anyone has suggestions, I’m open to hear them. #

Q. How much practical work are you having the students do? #

A. Most of the course content will be practical, hands-on material. It’s considered a “lab” class, which means there’s more class time. That said, I’ve experienced what Alfred Hermida mentioned: hands-on work often takes longer than you schedule for. Which is okay. I figure if we can get through the big three: audio, video and online writing, we’ll be meeting our mandate. #

Q. Are you also planning to go into issues like user-generated content or crowdsourcing? #

A. Not really. I may mention those things in passing, but this is really for the students to get their own feet wet with multimedia. We have three other online journalism classes where I will be touching on topics like those. #

Q. Can we have progress reports, as you get the chance, throughout the semester? #

A. Next fall will be the first time the course is offered, and I fully expect to have a running commentary on what’s working and what isn’t as it goes along. I’ll also be writing about our equipment strategy as we start making requests for funds. Stay tuned. #

Q. What’s the difference between this course and an “online journalism” course? #

A. Okay, so this question hasn’t been asked, but I wanted to explain this because it’s something that was discussed at length during development of the course. This is not a course in online journalism, per se. Many “online journalism” courses spend a lot of time working with HTML, CSS, Flash and similar “webby” stuff. We chose to steer clear of much of that material for this class, and the goal is to really focus on the storytelling/journalism and less on web delivery. I will not be asking students to develop their own web sites to present their multimedia efforts, for instance. We won’t spent much time writing HTML or CSS. We will probably post the stories on the class web site instead. Obviously, it’s not possible to totally avoid talking about web-based delivery, but that is definitely not the focus of the course. #

#