Article | Media Education

How Media Education can keep pace 

and pilot the emerging trends in Media

Dr. Mrinal Chatterjee

 Professor, Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC)

Introduction

Trend means the general course or prevailing tendency; drift[1]. In the research on pedagogy and the curriculum, trends are defined as ‘persistent patterns of changing practices in a domain’. Be it ‘general course’ or ‘prevailing tendency’ or ‘drift’ or even ‘persistent patterns of changing practices in a domain’ -the analysis of the trends takes account as far as possible of all factors that may have an impact on the domain, whether they come from wider social trends, government policy, within specific educational developments, or behaviours afforded by technological innovation. Any analysis of the trends present and emerging calls for taking a quick look at the history of media education[2] in India, which began in late thirties with a journalism course.

Media education in India

Many believe that undivided India’s first journalism course began in 1941 in Punjab University, Lahore. But according to Dr. Nadig Krishna Murthy former Professor of Journalism at Mysore University, the first systematic journalism course was introduced in National University at Adyar in Madras (now Chennai).[3] For practical training, the students were sent to New India of Annie Besant. The second attempt to introduce journalism education was made in Aligarh Muslim University in 1938 with a diploma course. Sir Shah Mohammed Sulaiman, a former judge of the Federal court of India, began the class. The teacher in charge was Raham Ali Al-Hashami. He had varied experience in the journalistic field having worked for several English and Urdu newspapers. For the benefit of students, he wrote a book on the subject in Urdu entitled, ‘Fan-e-Sahafath’, which was published by Anjuman-e-Tarraqui-e-Urdu. The course was successful but short-lived. Sir Sulaiman died in 1940. The teacher in charge resigned because of some differences with the authorities. The next attempt was in Punjab University, Lahore in 1941. The man behind the project was Prithvi Pal Singh, a highly intelligent man, who had his Journalism training in the University of Missouri, USA and for sometime was with International News Service and Pioneer. The course ran smoothly until 1947, when partition of the country divided the University and the department of Journalism was forced to be shifted to Delhi. It was revived at New Delhi in 1947 and affiliated to East Punjab University, which is now known as Panjab University. In 1962, it was shifted to Chandigarh. Madras University started a course in Journalism in 1947. Calcutta University started a Journalism course in 1950. There after many universities have started journalism course. Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) was established in 1965.

The growth of educational institutions offering mass communication courses has been phenomenal in the last two decades. By end 2014, India had over 300 media institutes and university departments compared to just over 25 in the early 1980s, offering various courses in journalism and mass communication- including public relations, advertising, media management, film making, etc. There are three universities exclusively for journalism education now: Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University for Journalism and Mass communication (MCU) in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, established in 1990, Kushabhau Thakre University of Journalism and Mass Communication,[4] Raipur, Chhattisgarh, established in 2005 and Haridev Joshi University of Journalism and Mass Communication[5], Jaipur, Rajasthan established in 2013. Many media institutes have opened under private management. Several media houses (like The Times of India, Pioneer, The Statesman, Indian Express, Tehelka, to name a few) have set up media schools- a trend which is catching up fast across the country. Besides two years master’s programme and one year post graduate diploma programme, several short duration skill-specific programmes are being offered.

The Architecture of Media Education

As rightly pointed out in the Unesco Model Curricula, 2007, journalism education in universities is normally organized around three curricular axes or lines of development[6]:

•      An axis comprising the norms, values, tools, standards, and practices of journalism;

•      An axis emphasizing the social, cultural, political, economic, legal and ethical aspects of journalism practice both within and outside the national borders; and

•      An axis comprising knowledge of the world and journalism’s intellectual challenges.

The coursework along the first axis prepares students to report, write and edit for the various media. It represents the core of any program designed to prepare students for careers in journalism. It should be noted, however, that the professional skills of journalism involve methods of knowing and thinking as well as recording and representing. A weakness of much of journalism education arises out of a failure to grasp the degree to which education in university disciplines constitutes (with reporting and writing) the foundations of the practice of journalism. On the other side of this equation, journalism students need training in the techniques of journalism and the use of equipment, by competent teachers and/or practicing journalists. To enrich the practical side, every program should include an internship (or placement) at a news media outlet, and journalism schools should develop partnerships with local news media.

The coursework along the second axis elucidates the institutional and societal contexts within which journalists function and connects the practice of journalism to related human activities. Such studies strengthen professional identity, values, and goals through an understanding of democratic functions and legal and moral constraints. They should emphasize professional and ethical attitudes and knowledge. They should also highlight the importance to democracy of independent journalism.

The coursework along the third axis exposes students to modern knowledge. In this respect, journalism is not a stand-alone discipline. It should be combined with education in the disciplines of arts and sciences. Journalism educators should steer their students towards study that expands and enriches the language of public life. Journalism education should include units, which are designed to promote prerequisite intellectual and craft skills. These foundations include:

• An ability to think critically, incorporating skill in comprehension, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of unfamiliar material, and a basic understanding of evidence and research methods.

• An ability to write clearly and coherently using narrative, descriptive, and analytical methods.

•Knowledge of national and international political, economic, cultural, religious, and social institutions.

•Knowledge of current affairs and issues, and a general knowledge of history and geography.

Status of Media Education in India

Looking from a theoretical framework, journalism education[7] in India is on the right track. It provides, at least its syllabus provides the right mix of theory and practice with a grounding on ethics and values; and tools to help appreciate and practice the profession. However, there are problems both in the way it is envisaged to be conducted and also in its practical implementation.

One major problem with media education at present relates to the learning objective. What is/are the learning objective/s of media students? This/these could be:

a.      Learning the skill so that they can immediately work in the industry

b.      Learning the theories and concepts of communication in general and media in particular so that they can understand and appreciate the present status and nature of media

c.       Learning the ethical and legal aspects related to media

d.      Learning how to conduct research in media studies, and so on.

It is a difficult task to do justice to all the learning objectives within say one year or two years, which most of our courses attempt to do. There is a problem in determining the focus of the course.

This wide variance in learning objective and accordingly teaching approach creates the major confusion regarding the nature of Media education.  On one hand media education needs to teach students hands on how to write/photograph/film a story. That means it also needs to provide hands on training to the students regarding use of relevant equipments and software. On the other hand students also need to know about the theory part and also the ethical and legal side (journalism students particularly need a through orientation about development aspects and issues) which require a completely different teaching approach.

The second problem relates to the demands of knowing the emerging and present technology that media are using now. With media becoming more and more technology driven, the praxis part is requiring extra attention. That precisely means persons who teach media students should know the technology or at least the applications and should keep abreast with the change/development in that domain. That warrants greater application by the media teachers engaged in that domain.

The third problem relate to the required infrastructure to teach the praxis part of media. Many of our university departments and institutions simply do not have the infrastructure. Even if they have, it is not maintained properly and updated, rendering it, to put it mildly, not very useful to the students.

The fourth problem is the lack of good teachers, well conversant with both theory and practice.

The fifth problem relate to the lack of a vigorous industry-academia interface.

These problems often lead people; especially the media practitioners question the very purpose and efficacy of media education. Therefore the need for media education needs to be reinforced.

Importance of Media Education

The UNESCO Declaration on Media Education by representatives of 19 nations meeting at Grunwald in 1982, focused on the ‘undoubted power of the media’ and the role they could play in the process of development, and as ‘instruments for the citizen’s active participation in society’. It called for ‘political and educational systems to recognize their obligations to promote in their citizens a critical understanding of the phenomena of communications’.

Over the last two decades, the number of news media outlets has grown rapidly all over the world, more so in India. By end 2014, over 94,000 newspapers and periodicals are published in India. Daily circulation of newspapers is over 200 million. There are over 500 radio stations in government and private domain. More are on their way including a sizable number of community radio stations. There are footprints of over 700 television channels in India. With over 900 million mobile handsets, India is one of fastest growing market for mobile phones. By end 2014, India has about 23 per cent Internet penetration.

More important than the numbers and figures is the fact that there has been an increased recognition of the crucial role of journalism in promoting democracy, ensuring accountability and transparency and helping the poor and the under privileged claiming their rights. This has created a growing demand for well-trained journalists.

  

Journalism, and the educational programmes that enable individuals to practice and upgrade their journalistic skills, are essential tools for the underpinning of key principles that are fundamental to the development of every country.

Besides, with the growth of Entertainment industry the need for trained media persons have also grown.

What is happening in the Media domain? What is the trend?

As discussed earlier, trends emerge with felt needs and maintained or altered by praxis. However, it also tries to accomplish the ideal. What should be the ideal and what are the needs of the hour- both gets reflected in the emerging trends. It is also impacted by the culture and value-system of the society.

Here is what I feel the media trends are:

1.      Engagement time with media is increasing, of course with wide variation across delivery platforms

2.      Audience attention span is decreasing[8].  

3.      Variety is increasing. This requires increasing specialized inputs  in niche areas.

4.      Convergence of delivery platforms, thanks to the development in digital technology

5.      Increasing cross media ownership. With convergence it requires the persons who would be working in the media to be technology savvy and adaptable to different delivery platforms.

6.      Social media is gaining ground very rapidly. Mainstream media is taking to the social media platforms and techniques.

And here is how I think Media Education can follow the trend or better still, trigger a trend:

How media education can match, or better still trigger the trend?

Marrying basics with praxis

It should be noted that the professional skills of journalism involve methods of knowing and thinking as well as recording and representing. Journalism students need training in the techniques of journalism, as practiced ‘here and now’. Skill training is an important part of media education. The basic skills related to media: aggregating and collating information, writing, editing and presenting- must be taught to the students.  As media industry is growing at a break neck speed, it is important to provide the required skill set to the students.

More ‘industry-focus’ is the trend in journalism and media education. Better media institutes are trying to synergize their syllabus in tune with the industry practice and requirement present and future. Providing more hands-on training is the trend. Live projects are being implemented in collaboration with media houses. With mobile phones taking the centre stage of all digital activities, it is becoming more cost-effective and logistically easier to handle.

Make Teaching and learning more collaborative

Teaching and learning have changed dramatically in the past 10 years due in part to the ubiquity of Web resources and online tools for coursework, research, and communication. With the advent of Web 2.0, interactive information sharing, collaboration, and user-centered design have become the new norm for online activities. Media convergence is providing new learning tools in the hands of both teachers and students. Blogs, wiki, rss are increasingly used in teaching both as interactive platforms between the faculty and students and as course work.[9] As the young generation is more comfortable working in teams and sharing on social networks, teachers must be willing to create partnerships to produce collaborative work.

Jane Hart, of the Centre for Learning & Performance technologies who compiles a yearly list of the Top 100 Tools for learning, sees four emerging trends in the tools being used in education.
The first she calls "Increasing consumerization of IT." This refers to people using more of their own personal tools rather than institution supplied tools. Her second trend is the merging of learning, working and personal tools. Users are choosing to expand the use of personal tools like Facebook and Twitter into the learning and working environment. Her third trend is that Social tools that facilitate co-production, communication and collaboration predominate. Hart says, "Learning professionals are recognizing the huge value of encouraging participation and interaction of learners in training." Her fourth trend is that personal (informal) learning is under the individual's control. This means that many are using tools like Google, Wikipedia and YouTube rather than traditional sources for informal learning.[10]

Media educators must learn and appreciate this change. They should gradually attempt to become facilitators of learning. The job of providing information is increasingly being done by the Internet. It is the job of the educators helps the students process the mass of information into nuggets of knowledge. However, for doing that they also need to keep abreast with the emerging technology.

Teaching ethics and values

Technology is after all a tool. At the end of the day, the question remains: technology for what? Media pundits believe that media education must have a strong element of values and ethics. Without a strong foundation of values, media education is just skill training. At present, all over the world, there is a growing resentment against media, especially news media for increasing trivialization of content and dumbing down of serious issues. In fact a recent survey finds trust in media is at all-time low. This has to be reversed. In developing countries like India, it assumes greater importance. Hence there is an urgent need for teaching the future journalists, content creators and media managers- ethics and values related to media. As Rohit Dhankar writes, “A commitment to good education will require an understanding of the need for education in people’s lives and society, and a reasonable dose of dreams”.[11]

More empirical research

Besides preparing students to be industry ready, media education must focus on research, mostly empirical research.[12]

Majority of the future research will be need-based, and mostly industry-funded. This should be an area of closer industry-academia interface.

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20 March April 2014

 Dr. Mrinal Chatterjee                                                                                                                                                                    Professor, Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) , 

Sanchar Marg, Dhenkanal 759 001, Odisha mrinalchatterjeeiimc@gmail.com

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[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trend

[2] The Missouri School of Journalism at University of Missouri in Columbia, USA is the oldest formal journalism school in the world. The school opened on September 14, 1908, at the urging of Joseph Pulitzer, following lobbying by Walter Williams, the editor of the Columbia (Missouri) Herald and a university curator, who is credited as the founder of the school. Considered one of the top journalism schools in the world, it is known for its "Missouri Method", through which students learn about journalism in the classroom as well as practicing it in multimedia laboratories and real-world outlets.

[3] Murthy Dr. Nadig Krishna, Indian Journalism: Origin, Growth and Development of Indian Journalism: from Asoka to Nehru, Prasanga, University of Mysore, 1966, pp. 412-414

[4] www.ktujm.ac.in

[5] http://www.hjuj.ac.in/

[6] Model Curricula for Journalism Education for Developing Countries & Emerging Democracies, UNESCO 2007

[7] Let me make a distinction between media education and journalism education, although at times these two words are almost used as synonyms. Media is an umbrella term which also covers journalism. Entertainment and education is an important part of media now. So does business.  Journalism concerns itself more with collection, collation and dissemination of information in a particular user-focused way and its analysis. Therefore the teaching approach in these disciplines will be different, although there could certain common elements. Media education was somehow negotiating with these differences.

[8] So much so that Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has been listed as global health crisis

[9]A blog (abbreviated from weblog) is often described as an online journal but might be better described as "web sites that are easily created and updated by those with even a minimum of technology know-how" (Richardson, 2004). At the simplest level most blogs are like an online diary. They allow the author(s) to write material direct into a form on the web and arrange entries by date. Depending upon the system used the entries may be archived by category, searchable, linked to entries in other blogs and have comments linked to them. Blogs can be used to build and maintain complex sets of interacting web sites. Like many good technologies they allow initial entry at a simple level with opportunities to extend to more sophisticated uses as necessary.
A wiki (from the Hawaiian for "quick") is web site that can be edited directly on the web. Probably the best known is the Wikipedia, a substantial and growing encyclopedia which is being built collaboratively. If you think that an entry in the Wikipedia could be improved, then you only need to click the edit link and make the necessary changes.

RSS, for Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication (Richardson, 2004), is usually associated with blogs and wikis. It allows a site to publish a feed which is a summary, sometimes headlines but maybe more, of content in the site. Aggregators enable users to bring together feeds from multiple sites into a single location where they can be easily checked for new content.

[10] (Top Tools for Learning: Emerging Trends, October 2010), www.c4lpt.co.uk/articles/toptools

[11] Dhankar Rohit, A template for teacher education, The Hindu, December 27, 2014

[12] Empirical Research is research that is based on experimentation or observation, i.e. evidence.  Such research is often conducted to answer a specific question or to test a hypothesis. Empirical research is a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct observation or experience. Empirical evidence (the record of one's direct observations or experiences) can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively. Through quantifying the evidence or making sense of it in qualitative form, a researcher can answer empirical questions, which should be clearly defined and answerable with the evidence collected.