The School of Journalism and Communication add 2 national first-class undergraduate courses
time: 2023-04-30

Recently, the Ministry of Education announced the second batch of first-class undergraduate courses at the national level. Among them, two of our school’s courses, including 1 national first-class hybrid online-and-offline course and 1 national offline first-class course, were successfully listed in the second batch.

The faculty members of Wu Xiaokun, Liu Yindi, Han Mei, Liu Qian, and Huang Yalan instruct the national first-class hybrid online and offline course “Theory and Practice of Data Journalism”. The objectives of this course are to address the following issues: the “emphasis on textbooks, light practice” problem in traditional journalism education; the disconnect between theory and practice in higher education; the exploration of reasonable, diverse, and sound comprehensive assessment indicators; and the establishment of a scientific achievement evaluation system. It helps to address the issue of traditional curriculum’s inadequate conversion of homework outcomes, and investigate a comprehensive and scientific mixed teaching model for data journalism courses in the context of information technology. This includes optimizing the distribution and interaction of online and offline teaching resources and collaborating with professional media to create a practice platform where students can turn “homework to work”. The accumulated teaching resources of the course include: self-edited textbooks, MOOCs produced by SCUT, hybrid course design scheme, test database, data resource database, database of classic data journalism cases from home and abroad, and online and offline comprehensive performance evaluation system construction scheme. The course is intended for senior undergraduate journalism and communication students. It aims to help students gain a thorough understanding of the current and future trends in the news industry, and the fundamental logic behind identifying problems from data and utilizing it to inform news stories. Additionally, students will gain proficiency in data acquisition, analysis, and visualization, which will enable them to independently complete interactive data journalism projects. The society acknowledges the course work completed by students. They have received 14 awards in various national data journalism competitions and published over 30 articles in the media in recent years.

The team members of the national offline first-class undergraduate course “Fundamentals of Photography” are Chen Ying and Zheng Zhong, under the direction of Associate Professor Zhou Yu. Every undergraduate student enrolled in their first year may take this course. It’s a professional foundation course with distinct technical and practical characteristics. Based on the journalism and communication curriculum in the new liberal arts background, the course begins with classroom instruction, fully utilizes the self-built network teaching platform, engages in case studies, the flipped classroom, and mutual evaluation among students. It also expands the scope of traditional classroom instruction to online and after-class learning, and closely connects theory to practice through competition teaching. Meanwhile, the ideology and politics of the curriculum, cutting-edge technology, and communication concepts are all naturally interwoven in accordance with the reality of media development and change. Throughout the teaching process, a great emphasis is placed on guide students to think critically and to keep up with current communication trends. It works to progressively move from traditional “teaching” to “teaching + research” and ultimately to “teaching + research + service”. Therefore, the course is praised by learners, instructors, and specialists. After ten years’ effort, the course has established a audio-visual case database of more than 1,000 audio-visual cases. The MOOC course named “Camera Principles and Technology” will be released shortly and will go on to benefit college and social learners.

The school places a high value on undergraduate instruction. So far, it has been approved to offer four national first-class undergraduate courses and four provincial first-class undergraduate courses. These courses offer strong support for the development of exceptional talent. Next, the school will deepen the reform undergraduate education, improve the quality of teachers, develop more top-notch courses, and continuously raise the standard of talent development.