2011 AEJMC Promising Professor Award

Every year, the Mass Communication & Society Division and Graduate Education Interest Group of AEJMC select tenure-track faculty members for their national AEJMC Promising Professor Awards. I am honored to have been chosen for this year’s third place award. Unfortunately, due to a personal matter I won’t be able to attend the awards panel at the AEJMC Conference in St. Louis on August 10. I, therefore, recorded my presentation “Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Embracing New Media Challenges in the Classroom.”

Please view my presentation on YouTube. You can also download the presentation slides without audio. The awards panel will take place on Wednesday at 3:15 p.m. (CST) at the Renaissance Hotel in St. Louis. Please also read a faculty feature by VCU News.

I’d like to thank my School’s former Director Terry Oggel for nominating me for this award as well as the my colleagues at the School of Mass Communications for their support of my teaching and research, especially Jeff South who has developed our intercultural social media program with me. Also thanks to VCU’s Center for Teaching Excellence for funding some of my teaching projects. In addition, I’d like to thank the many media partners and organizations that allow my students to work on real-life projects, especially Michael Fibison at Yahoo (previously with Media General) and Karri Peifer at Richmond.com.

The following is my submission for the Promising Professor Awards competition:

Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Embracing New Media Changes in the Classroom

How do we fund quality journalism in the future? Can an iPad app be the savior for our newsroom? Or the Google One Pass? What’s going to be the ROI for social media? And how do we report in 140 characters on Twitter and achieve engaging multimedia reporting with shrinking newsroom resources?

All professions in mass communications are undergoing dramatic change. But especially in journalism, many professionals and academics feel a great level of uncertainty – yes, even anxiety – over the future. Textbooks are often outdated within a year and the pressure to update skills and knowledge is tremendous.

“Who will hire our students, when newspapers are dying around us,” is a question I often hear from colleagues.

I simply answer, “Let the students embrace the change to become the driving force behind it.”

If the profession has problems adapting, then we need to drive the change for our students’ sake. Their future is our task. This has been my teaching philosophy in my classes for the past four years as an assistant professor in the journalism track of the School of Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University.

I have been educated as a traditional print journalist and learned to embrace online reporting while working as a newspaper reporter and editor. But by now it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest trends that occur on a monthly basis (sometimes even faster) and teach them authoritatively. So, I have changed my strategy and told my students: “Let’s face this challenge together.”

Don’t get me wrong. I educate myself all the time. I, for instance, took video editing and Web production courses to bring myself to the latest standards of multimedia reporting. I constantly test new cameras. I have also been selected to develop online courses at my university and teach colleagues about the latest tools. But technology and platforms are developing so fast that I see it as my task to introduce my students to them and the concepts behind them. I let them explore them at the same time as the profession considers adopting them.

So, whether I teach my Social Media Seminar, my Reporting for Print and Web class or my Business of Media course, I make it very clear to my students that I will pose challenges to them that I do not even have all of the answers to. This earns me confusing reactions in the beginning. But today’s students are quick in taking on challenges, especially those that involve technology. And it has been my experience that the learning outcomes are tremendous when students are enabled to be creative and innovative. And they are well positioned to become the new leaders in our field.

The following are the teaching principles I have come to embrace in almost all of my classes during the last couple of semesters:

Partnering with students: Asking students to embrace new technologies and the challenges they bring, means to ask for a much greater effort than in a traditional journalism class. In order to achieve this additional motivation in my students, I fully involve myself in our projects. If I can demonstrate my efforts in tackling the challenges we face, I can ask them to do the same. Using social bookmarking tools like Delicious in my media business class, I assign students readings on the latest developments and ask them to share their own resources. Basically, I enable them to assign me readings as well, which we then discuss in our online forum. I also run my reporting class as a newsroom during the second half of the semester in which I hold editorial meetings and engage with students almost daily to improve their multimedia stories to professional standards.

Building partnerships: Companies and newsrooms face dramatic challenges for which they have not found solutions. That’s an open door for my students and the reason why I have established many media partnerships for my classes over the last four years. My media business class was asked by the Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Va., to develop a business plan for the iPad app, which the newspaper plans to launch. I partnered with the U.S. State Department to launch a social media institute that combines 25 undergraduate and graduate students from VCU with 25 college students from Iraq. In teams, they develop social media strategies for political and social change. And my reporting class partnered with the local portal Richmond.com on a multimedia reporting project that gets them published and puts them in a very competitive position for internships and future jobs.

Facing the challenge: When I engage with my students in these projects, I make sure that they are well prepared. We conduct extensive research before we develop our own ideas. My media business students conduct in-depth interviews with industry leaders to discuss their visions. We review the results from the interviews in class discussions. The students in my social media institute select non-profit organizations they want to develop social media campaigns for. In personal meetings they learn about the needs of these organizations before they start the project development. And my reporting class researches and writes extensive reports about their multimedia beats before they start the actual reporting. This teaches my students that they need to become experts on a topic before they are able to develop ideas and drive the change.

Learning to innovate: My students learn quickly that innovation is not one quick, brilliant idea (although some believe that at first), but instead a long process that demands a lot of effort from them. When my business students start developing their iPad business plans, I ask them to share their initial ideas with professionals. They must convince senior management of the ideas. As the students in my social media institute propose their strategies, I bring in professionals and colleagues to provide tough criticism. And my reporting students receive constant feedback on their stories. Three to four rewrites are normal in that class. It teaches my students to deal with criticism and skepticism and pushes them to work harder and to question themselves along the way.

Changing the profession: My students are exhausted at the end of the semester. But they know that they have achieved something that they cannot learn in a traditionally taught journalism class. They have engaged in projects that put them at the forefront of change in our profession. They are starting journalists and know how to make the business side of the newsroom work. They know how to run a social media campaign in diverse environments. And they are on the ground reporting for multimedia and social media platforms. I sometimes hear from students after they graduate, complaining that they starting out in newsrooms which are very slow in adopting all of the changes. The students feel that they cannot work up to their full potential. I then remind them that they are the ones who can change the profession with all of the skills they acquired and move it into the future.

Currently, I am completing my fourth year as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and have taught 10 different classes that had enrollments between 10 and 200 students at the undergraduate and graduate level. I have also been at the forefront of implementing our new Multimedia Journalism Masters program since 2008.

I am serving as head of the Communication Technology Division of AEJMC and as an advisory board member of the Social Media Club Education Connection, which works at establishing benchmarks for education in social media. I have received five teaching grants from my university’s Center for Teaching Excellence and from external sources that ranged between $500 and $200,000 for social media, multimedia journalism and online teaching projects.

My social media institute, which has been funded by the U.S State Department, was praised on the White House website as “A step toward mutual understanding” between the U.S. and Iraq. A representative of the State Department wrote the following about the program in an e-mail to me: “Absolutely fabulous…Great program, great team…I have been sharing the good news and your good work with colleagues!” One of the students in my social media class wrote: “I think the program is fantastic…It makes me look to life in a different angle—an optimistic one.”

At the end of one my classes, two students wrote the following about their experience: “There was a realization that being social, at its core, has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with an open mind, curiosity and respect. The technology gives us convenient access to broadcast and to connect, but without the fundamental interest in and passion for fellow humans, the tools mean little.”

Feedback like this strengthens my belief that new teaching methods are necessary to meet the challenges of today’s new media environment. It also motivates me to recalibrate my own teaching approaches every semester.