Small learning communities, improved advising and participation in relevant extracurricular activities are among the goals for the School of Communication’s initiative to reconstruct their undergraduates’ experience.
The school is in the midst of implementing a program that will expand offerings to communication majors, which the school hopes to complete later this year and expects to institute later this year or next year. It is all based on ideas from students.
“All of these changes were inspired by a conversation with the School of Communication Dean’s Advisory Council – a group of undergraduates who advise me about school programs and priorities,” said Barbara J. O’Keefe, academic dean in the School of Communication.
A committee consisting of Communication Dean Sally Ewing, five faculty members and two undergraduate students has been appointed to redesign the Communication freshman experience, O’Keefe said. Module approval is expected to begin in December.
Committee members collected feedback from students and from it, developed a plan to create a more intimate learning environment, improve advising, make inter-departmental studying easier, integrate extracurricular activities into the Communication experience and incorporate career preparation into the coursework, O’Keefe said.
A key component of the project is a curriculum based on “modules,” she said. A module consists of four to six related courses. The series of courses will culminate in the completion of a project, asking students to demonstrate how the course subjects relate to each other, as well as to co-curricular activities in which they participate.
Communication sophomore Sophia Robele said completing small series of classes would be beneficial to her learning experience.
“I’ve taken a lot of the intro courses,” the communication studies major said. “They’ve just been a lot of random, not specific things, so it would be cool to have classes that are more related to each other.”
The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders is proposing four different modules, said Chuck Larson, the department chair. These include Brain and Communication, Children and Communication, Professional Voice: The Integration of Art and Science and Civic Engagement: Advocating for Persons with Communication Disorders.
The module program is still being developed and approved, and when it will take action is uncertain, Larson said. He added that the system will better prepare students for their lives after NU.
“Students are going to benefit a great deal because they’re going to be taking sets of courses that integrate knowledge across what are now just different stand-alone courses,” he said. “They’ll be much better equipped to practice or go into graduate work or clinical practice with better understanding of these larger issues.”
Some curricular changes have already taken effect. As of Sept. 1, the Department of Radio, Television and Film expanded RTVF 190, one of three gateway classes in the department, making it easier to transfer into the RTVF program or to take advanced RTVF classes.
RTVF has also hired a new faculty member, Erik Gernand, to focus on serving the needs of freshman.
He has already taken a group of freshman to the Chicago International Film Festival, according to David Tolchinsky, RTVF’s department chair. “Other faculty, likewise, are planning ‘learning’ field trips associated with the classes they’re teaching, one way to get faculty and students together in small groups.”
Tolchinsky said the RTVF department is also making more of an effort to promote student films.
“That’s kind of perfect,” said Communication junior Stephen Ling, majoring in RTVF. “A huge problem in RTVF is faculty never get involved in student productions, which is kind of where everyone learns everything and having their input would be fantastic.”
