Digital Media Services Initiative on Display at Campus Technology Annual Conference
At last summer’s Campus Technology annual conference in Washington, D.C., four panelists from DIIA shared with a national higher education audience insights from the Digital Media Service’s (DMS) year-long pilot program to encourage faculty to use multimedia technologies. Moderator Susanna Wong Herndon, associate director for teaching-enhanced learning, was joined by DIIA associate dean Robert Bruce, media specialist Lucas Horton, and senior lecturer Leslie Jarmon for a session entitled Preparing 21st Century Students.
Bruce stressed the importance to the success of the pilot program of DIIA’s mission to integrate three core functions: promoting sound pedagogy, integrating instructional technology, and performing ongoing assessment. Horton explained that global DMS goals to foster media literacy and professional skills are secondary to the learning goals of participating faculty members. The role of Horton and DMS staff is to facilitate instructional designs that incorporate student media projects to make course experiences student-centered, authentic, transferable, collaborative, and balanced.
Speaking to a faculty perspective, Jarmon said that the fifteen skeptical graduate students in her spring project management seminar were won over to her efforts to build their media literacy. After partnering with community-based or government agencies all semester, the students’ final projects were back-to-back five-minute presentations with embedded iMovie productions, delivered to clients and faculty in a corporate setting. When that tough audience expressed astonishment at the richness and professionalism of the reports, the students understood the competitive advantage they had enjoyed by demonstrating sophisticated communication skills through digital media tools. “Digital media competency,” Jarmon advised faculty in the audience, “is a requirement for the very best 21st century professionals.”
Herndon expressed optimism for the future of DMS at UT Austin, in light of insight gained from DIIA’s systematic assessment of the initiative’s process and protocol, capacity, faculty readiness, and student learning outcomes.