Everyone today can create media. According to IU Indianapolis Journalism & New Media Professor Adam Maksl, “We spend more time in our day, including sleep, interacting with digital media. In a world where everyone can create media, much of what’s out there is noise. If we can teach students strong skills in creating that media, they will stand tall.”
IU’s BS in Digital Media and Storytelling builds that those skills. Not through a single disciplinary lens, but by yoking together communications, journalism, English, public relations, media, and fine arts into a program that reflects digital media today.
The path to the degree
The degree started small. Some five years ago, Maksl, then a professor at IU Southeast, visualized an interdisciplinary credential combining journalism and media courses. Sensing a market need for a more substantial program, Maksl reasoned: what better place to teach digital media than in the media environment itself.
What emerged is a collaborative program that draws on faculty expertise across IU East, Kokomo, Indianapolis, Northwest, and Southeast. Teaching and Learning Technologies has consulted with faculty across campuses on instructional design, helping to build courses for a degree that can flex with the digital landscape.
Today’s digital communication
The degree foundation centers on mass communications, far outpacing traditional journalism. Students complete a core curriculum that includes creative writing, a writing specialty, visual literacy, digital tools, law, and media history. A sophomore seminar taken by all students in the program is, as Maksl says, “an applied survey course,” where students analyze and practice hands-on skills in digital writing, digital photography, audio, video, and emerging/interactive media. Students then choose a path: advanced making (digital storytelling) or strategy (public relations).
Within those tracks, the choices multiply. Storytelling students might focus on photography, digital audio, video production and editing, interactive media, narrative construction, or social media strategies. Public relations specialists take a communications core, then specialize—advertising, persuasion, propaganda, media theory, or media as social institutions.
The flexibility is deliberate. Students see media morph in real time; the degree can do the same.
Stories sell
“A big part of today’s world is about stories,” says Tiffany Carbonneau, IU Southeast professor of Fine Arts. “Any industry—news, journalism, marketing, strategic communications, PR—that wants to tell a story, visually or orally, wants employees skilled in generating interesting narratives, ethically and successfully.”
At the core of the degree is storytelling tethered to job readiness. Everyone takes a career readiness course. Group work, especially in the capstone, trains students for the teamwork that defines contemporary careers.
The capstone: teams, portfolios, and real-world artifacts
Patrick Johnson designed the capstone course, drawing on his background in media production. Johnson is IU Northwest Associate Professor and Program Coordinator. The course comprises three main components. The first is teamwork—”not the easiest thing to teach in an entirely online degree,” he notes.
The second is professional presentation. Students polish portfolios that demonstrate what they’d offer a potential employer. They compile resumes, online portfolios, job applications, and cover letters. With the feedback they receive, they can shape these into working documents.
The third is a team-created cohesive website that tells a story. Each member of the team contributes something unique reflecting their expertise—a photojournalism story, infographics, a mini-documentary, a podcast, video or audio production, PR content, photography, or graphic design. One student serves as project manager, keeping the project cohesive and on track. Another focuses on PR, creating social media posts to demonstrate how the group might advertise the project.
This semester’s standout project, titled Indiana Festivals, includes an interactive map, a minidocumentary about the Covered Bridge Festival, a video podcast about Corydon Glasstoberfest, and stories about other festivals across Indiana. Another project focuses on fitness trends and a third presents a guide to AI in the digital media landscape.
“Students in any media production degree need tangible evidence of their skills,” says Johnson. In the capstone and elsewhere in the program, students create “tangible artifacts that matter to employers.”
Johnson is looking ahead to future capstone courses that include real-world clients. The Northwest campus is hosting an international black film festival and needs students to run Zoom interview panels and create media content. He also hopes to develop an alumni database to track graduates’ careers, connecting current students with internships and with professionals alert to job openings.
Developing at the pace of change
The changing landscape of media opens countless opportunities that require savviness in media literacy. “The nice thing about this degree program is how dynamic it can be,” Maksl says. “As the market flexes and changes, we can develop tracks or concentrations as needed. We’re not just preparing students for the market as it exists now, but for positions in the market they’ll enter when they graduate, for careers that even experts can’t imagine in this light-speed evolution of media-based professions.”
A DMS faculty committee meets during the semester to discuss program directions and assessment. Maksl finds most students choose the advanced making track, so future offerings will likely augment digital skills. Generative AI already plays a role across the curriculum and in the communications law course, so a course in AI and media is one possibility. Some of Carbonneau’s advanced art and design students are using IU’s Jetstream2, a user-friendly cloud-based computing environment, for 3D modeling and the sophisticated level of animation impossible on individual laptops. “This is a potential game-changer,” says Carbonneau, “and could open possibilities for future courses in 3D and animation.”
Countless career visions
Students are visualizing careers across the map. In Johnson’s capstone course of 20 students, 18 visualized distinct career outcomes.
In her role as academic advisor for IU Online, IU Kokomo’s Candace Murray has encountered many professional aspirations. One graduate is headed to law school for a career in media law and copywriting for the music industry. Another is focusing on publishing with a minor in writing. Murray says, “Creative writers and graphic designers tend to view the DMS degree as preparation for the ‘softer’ side of business—communications, storyboarding, marketing and advertising. For photographers, videographers, and artists, the DMS can be an ‘art catchall’ degree, where they fill open electives with art classes.”
Other students foresee roles as influencers, creating digital content for Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. The program has attracted professional influencers who take couple of classes or spend a semester gaining new skills or refining existing ones.
“The skills you earn with this degree are transferrable to countless existing and future industries,” Murray says. “With this degree, the world is your oyster.” Even if that world looks nothing like what we can imagine from here.
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