2008 Poynter Educators Forum

sorry for the repetitive post under what you want to learn from others...

but here's what's working, or seems to be:
At the University of Arizona...

We are strictly a journalism program, no advertising/pr/comm. Historically, whether print or broadcast, our students have taken the same first two years of core journalism courses. We're hopeful that this will make for relatively smooth transition to incorporating multimedia into the program. Our multimedia curriculum efforts in the University of Arizona journalism department are three-fold. We are:

** Layering nearly the entire curriculum with some multimedia learning, beginning even in the first two reporting and writing classes. (The challenge is teaching it without having adquate lab capabilities to have all students doing what we want them to do, but our faculty have jumped in and been very resourceful.)

** Offering students the opportunity to develop expertise in multimedia in their later years, after they have taken the fundamental journalism courses. All students must take a capstone publication. Two of our five capstone publications are fully online news publications, one (Border Beat) with a focus on U.S.-Mexico border issues, the other (The Cat Scan) focusing on environmental/green issues. We plan to expand our two traditional print publications (one a bilingual newspaper covering South Tucson, the other a paper covering a small town called Tombstone) to be fully multimedia.

** Riding the wave. Like everyone, were in such a state of change, that were just trying to be flexible and encourage the students to be grounded in the fundamentals and enthusiastic about innovation. We realize, too, what were doing now is likely to look different in 5-10 years. For example, Where now we want to teach a stand-alone class in multimedia concurrent with one of the beginning journalism courses, we know that in a decade we might not need to as the skills may be as universal as word processing is today.