Convergent publishing is one of the harder courses to prepare for going into a given semester. I want to provide a platform for students to create content that reflects their interest and allows those students to apply what they have learned in the first two years of the Multimedia Journalism program towards a representation of their skills up to this point.
This course is essentially a modification of a series of classes I taught at Ohio University of Lancaster. Previous sessions were mostly focused on creating a website by using Flash design, HTML/CSS coding, and basic textual content. This course removes the coding components as I felt the newer content management systems (CMS) allowed for more plug-and-play opportunities without the need to hard-code the site. Students could install a CMS on their own domain without the need to code the theme or the interactivity within the site.
This post represents my process and rationales for the decisions that were central to the overall design of my syllabus for “Convergent Publishing.” Step zero in my course design is crafting a course description that I feel gets to the root of a problematic of study or presents a worthwhile educational experience for all stakeholders in the class.
Course Description
My course description for Convergent Publishing is:
“Convergent publishing is all about providing news to people when, where and how they want it, using any and all communication tools available. These tools are useful for everyone, however, not just journalists; therefore, this course will address a variety of uses for these tools. Many of these are part of the college student’s life—Twitter, YouTube, the web, blogging, and Facebook, but we will also explore the shooting and editing of video, taking still photographs, and working with content management systems like WordPress. Students will also concentrate on writing clarity, improving their researching skills, as well as their talents as feature writers. Previous skills already acquired come together with new ones to make you a highly marketable graduate. With all of these elements in mind, it is important to note that this is considered a “rigors” course.”
The term “rigors” in the course description is important in this context as I wanted this course to be as close to a real-world simulation to the workflow a student would experience in a digital newsroom. The course is primarily a course in time management. Students know they need to complete 50 stories before the end of the semester and are required to complete at least one new story each week for public review or one-on-one feedback. My rationale for this level of work is related to both the level of the course (it is a 3000-level/junior-level course) and the nature of publishing business and most media organizations.
Most students entering this course will be juniors or seniors. The majority of the course they have taken up to this point will have focused on the construction of mediated content. They should know the journalism breakdown and the fundamental of producing quality journalistic works with effective use of mediated elements to tell as complete of a story as possible from the vantage point of the reporter. This course will hopefully expand their process to incorporate promoting their own work online and maintaining a CMS by themselves. Medium.com was the CMS used in the past as the focus of the course was maintaining a publication schedule. WordPress will be the CMS going forward as students need the practice of working on the backend of the system in conjunction with keeping a publication schedule.
Course Objectives
I have discussed in a previous post about how I use the course learning objective and assessment analysis (CLOA) to craft the course objectives. The normal role of the CLOA is to create a series of checks that ensure course objectives are more than a series of aspirational statements that could be evaluated through a set of formative and summative assessment tools.
These six learning objectives were designed to be practical concerning assessment and directly connecting to the description of the course. There were concerns about the broader strokes of what was going to be taught in class and the overall expectations of the course. Students will be able to complete the following course objectives by the end of the semester to earn A in the course. Those six objectives are that students will be able to are:
1.) recognize the generally accepted style and presentation norms associated with most forms of journalistic and mediated content,
2.) construct clear, focused essays or blogs with effective supporting points while using effective introductions and conclusions and utilizing appropriate transitions to connect ideas,
3.) sustain a consistent tone, with variations appropriate to the audience and purpose of the website,
4.) analyze the best practices of determining the credibility and the ethical nature of a given news source,
5.) make judgments of the quality of other’s work, and
6.) put together the elements of multimedia journalism to create a series of well-structured stories for the purpose of starting and maintaining a website.
Course Assessment
Each Friday will begin a short introduction related to the top ten most common AP style and grammar mistakes students make in the industry. Rick Brunson noted the top ten mistakes were:
- subject-verb agreement,
- spelling/vocabulary,
- collective nouns,
- it’s vs. its,
- indefinite pronouns,
- pronoun confusion,
- dangling modifiers,
- compound modifiers,
- parallel construction, and
- essential & non-essential clauses.
The plan is to set aside five to ten minutes each Friday and use that time as a study guide for Monday’s quiz. The first five questions of each Monday’s quiz will go over those Friday study guides. Questions six to ten will force the students to look over the AP study guide to find the correct usage of a given term in the guide. Questions eleven to fifteen will comes from the top stories of the New York Times, Washington Post, Columbus Dispatch, and other news sources. I believe these quizzes should assess the first course learning objective: “recognize the generally accepted style and presentation norms associated with most forms of journalistic and mediated content.”
The first time the students complete the in-class assay and one-on-one story review will act as the assessment for the second course learning objective, which is to “construct clear, focused essays or blogs with effective supporting points while using effective introductions and conclusions and utilizing appropriate transitions to connect ideas.” The students will receive feedback on their ability to use clear language and valid supporting points in the work from their fellow students using the ethical feedback model. Their one-on-one session will provide more guidance if it is required.
The remaining five one-on-one sessions will be used to assess the third (“sustain a consistent tone, with variations appropriate to the audience and purpose of the website”) and fourth (“analyze the best practices of determining the credibility and the ethical nature of a given news source”) course learning objectives. Students will be required to sit down with me and discuss the process they used to both create their content for a given audience and select sources to support in their stories in the form of embedded links. The students will learn about ideal and imagined audiences in the second week of the course. Those imagined and ideal audiences will need to be defined in their executive summary for the site, which will be turned in at the end of the second week. The writing for the remainder of the semester should be focused on communicating with that given audience.
Students will also need to justify the links they use to support their story. Each story must have a minimum of five embedded link with no more than two links going to the same site. We will discuss the CRAAP test of information to determine the credibility of the external sources. There will also be discussions regarding the ethos of journalistic writing and determining the credibility of non-online sources for stories.
Students will be assessed on the fifth course learning objective “make judgments of the quality of other’s work” during the remaining assay sessions. The students will need to provide careful thought out feedback during these sessions. Each student will need to provide both positive and negative feedback to each story that is presented during this time.
The final course learning objective (“put together the elements of multimedia journalism to create a series of well-structured stories for the purpose of starting and maintaining a website”) will be assessed during the final presentation of the student’s site.
All rubrics will be released early on in the class.
Course Literature
Two primary readings are required for this course: Brooks, Pinson, & Wilson’s (2016). “Working with Words: A Handbook for Media Writers and Editors” and the “2018 Associated Press Stylebook.” “Working with Words” will act as the foundational text during the Friday review session as the students will be assigned to review specific passages for the book based on the given Friday’s lesson. The “2018 Associated Press Stylebook” is required as it is the journalist’s bible and the answers for the second part of the quizzes come from this text.
Summary
The hope is by the end of the semester that the students will know more about the workflow needed to maintain a digital journalism platform and produce work that can act as a portfolio of their talents and skills.
