The most recent revision of UPOU’s Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Studies programme was the product of the efforts of all the faculty at the Faculty of Information and Communication Studies. The junior faculty, in particular, brought about the most meaningful changes and additions. One of my ideas was the the addition of MMS 199 (Undergraduate Seminar on Multimedia Studies), a single unit course, into the curriculum as a core major course. I remember the 199 and 299 courses I took in the past. I took them for granted at the time. But in hindsight, I believe that those little courses were quite helpful in starting me out in this long learning process of doing research. I learned a lot from studying other peoples’ work.
Going on study leave meant that I probably wouldn’t be able to have any significant involvement in the development of the course. Fortunately, I was offered the chance to help out when it was deployed for the first time recently — an offer I happily accepted. The approach to teaching the course had to veer a little from how 199 courses are traditionally taught in other campuses (or at least how they were taught back in my day), though. Instead of getting everyone pick a third party research paper to talk about, students were given the choice of presenting their own special project proposals or manuscripts, which could be helpful to them. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, students did not get any feedback prior to the posting their presentations. That is why you are going to notice that many of the presentations below are still a bit rough in terms of the quality of production and content.
Generally speaking, these students still have some ways to go. I had found that they will need continued guidance in order to conduct multimedia research more effectively. I wonder how much of this weakness is inherent to the students and how much of it is because of the programme itself. Perhaps this is something UPOU must continue to investigate.
Just as importantly, as I have told them, what was groundbreaking in multimedia 10 years ago is child’s play today. If any of us intend to remain as marketable multimedia practitioners, we need to keep up with the times. We are expected to do better than the average Tiktok or Instagram user. If we want to compete, creating content and its continued improvement, regardless of context, has to be second nature for us. It’s something I constantly struggle with, myself.
With all that said, I am happy with the class outcomes. I’ve even learned a thing or two from the class. I’m proud of the students who recorded the video presentations below. Most of them were taken out of their comfort zones for this. I’ve also asked them to keep these videos up. These are things they can come back to, and possibly re-use at some point in the future. It is also my hope that these videos serve as reference points for succeeding classes as they try to do the same for themselves. I have a good feeling about this new course. Even if it’s just one unit, I think it can be the thing that fills the gaps left by other major courses in the BAMS programme.