For the past few months I’ve been working to make the National Diploma in Journalism, a New Zealand industry standard qualification, available for online study through Wintec. It’s a big project which has demanded a lot of work by a core group of people and which has also involved a lot of imagining – how the course will work, how long exercises will take to do, how students will interact with the material, with us, with each other. Just as with building a website, until you have users – in our case, students – you can’t really know how it’s going to work.
We’ve read about online instruction and community building, we’ve picked people’s brains about their experience of teaching and learning online, we’ve inherited some material from the people who first ran this course, at WITT in the Taranaki, and we’ve done our best to take classroom activities and transform them for the online experience and to conceive new teaching and learning materials that we think will make sense for and engage someone who is sitting alone at a computer at their home or work.
In a couple of weeks our real, rather than imagined, students will be starting the course and letting us know directly what is working for them and what isn’t. I can’t wait. I’m realling looking forward to meeting them. Between this project and launching All About The Story, I’ve become a huge fan of constructive feedback and ceaselessly interested in learning what users need.
The National Diploma is taught in a number of polytechs and universities in New Zealand, including Wintec, and is usually covered in a full-time one-year course or incorporated into the third year of a degree programme. We are offering the online, or distance learning, version of the course over two years and students can expect to spend up to 15 hours a week on study – quite a commitment. That said, we think we’ve built a rich and interesting course and are looking forward to developing a useful online community with our students, and exploring crossover with our face to face students.
Enrolments are done and dusted and the course starts with an orientation week on Monday February 8, but we may be able to squeak one or two more people in – so if you know of anyone who wants a journalism qualification but wants to study from home while they continue to work, give them this link or my email: julie.starr@wintec.ac.nz.
The start of the course will coincide with the end of my stint as Editor in Residence at Wintec, a position I’ve held and enjoyed for the past two years. It’s time now for someone else to bring their industry experience and perspective to our students, fresh speakers to our Media Bites lunch functions, and to manage the production of the Fieldays Exhibitor, a newspaper produced daily by students during the Fieldays event each year.
I will be continuing on at Wintec, overseeing the online National Diploma in Journalism programme, doing a little teaching and spending time with students as and when. The rest of the time I’ll be developing All About The Story and, maybe, doing a bit more writing. We’ll see.
All Evolving Newsroom
New journalism course, new students, new job
For the past few months I’ve been working to make the National Diploma in Journalism, a New Zealand industry standard qualification, available for online study through Wintec. It’s a big project which has demanded a lot of work by a core group of people and which has also involved a lot of imagining – how the course will work, how long exercises will take to do, how students will interact with the material, with us, with each other. Just as with building a website, until you have users – in our case, students – you can’t really know how it’s going to work.
We’ve read about online instruction and community building, we’ve picked people’s brains about their experience of teaching and learning online, we’ve inherited some material from the people who first ran this course, at WITT in the Taranaki, and we’ve done our best to take classroom activities and transform them for the online experience and to conceive new teaching and learning materials that we think will make sense for and engage someone who is sitting alone at a computer at their home or work.
In a couple of weeks our real, rather than imagined, students will be starting the course and letting us know directly what is working for them and what isn’t. I can’t wait. I’m realling looking forward to meeting them. Between this project and launching All About The Story, I’ve become a huge fan of constructive feedback and ceaselessly interested in learning what users need.
The National Diploma is taught in a number of polytechs and universities in New Zealand, including Wintec, and is usually covered in a full-time one-year course or incorporated into the third year of a degree programme. We are offering the online, or distance learning, version of the course over two years and students can expect to spend up to 15 hours a week on study – quite a commitment. That said, we think we’ve built a rich and interesting course and are looking forward to developing a useful online community with our students, and exploring crossover with our face to face students.
Enrolments are done and dusted and the course starts with an orientation week on Monday February 8, but we may be able to squeak one or two more people in – so if you know of anyone who wants a journalism qualification but wants to study from home while they continue to work, give them this link or my email: julie.starr@wintec.ac.nz.
The start of the course will coincide with the end of my stint as Editor in Residence at Wintec, a position I’ve held and enjoyed for the past two years. It’s time now for someone else to bring their industry experience and perspective to our students, fresh speakers to our Media Bites lunch functions, and to manage the production of the Fieldays Exhibitor, a newspaper produced daily by students during the Fieldays event each year.
I will be continuing on at Wintec, overseeing the online National Diploma in Journalism programme, doing a little teaching and spending time with students as and when. The rest of the time I’ll be developing All About The Story and, maybe, doing a bit more writing. We’ll see.
Here’s to a great year.