This year, for the first time, the International School of Multimedia Journalism will be supplemented by an online project day: For the participating students from Denmark, Georgia, Austria and Ukraine, the programme not only includes dealing with the topic of “digitalisation of the working world”. In addition to exciting insights into the project, they will learn about current tools in multimedia journalism and implement their first small multimedia projects.
For many young journalists from Ukraine and Georgia, the International School of Multimedia Journalism (ISMJ) means inspiration, a window to Europe and confrontation with a completely different working world. For most participants from Austria and Denmark, the ISMJ is a voyage of discovery into an unknown world. For all participants, no matter where they come from, the ISMJ means inspiration, overcoming one’s own limits and growing in the face of challenges. In order to live up to this claim even in times of a pandemic and to further deepen the cooperation with our partners, an online project day on the topic of “Digitalisation of the world of work” will take place as a new format in the coming winter semester 2021/2022. The online ISMJ will serve as preparation for the regular ISMJ 2022, which will again be held in face-to-face classes in July next year and where participants can again work together on multimedia reports.
Focus on digital competences
During the project day of the online ISMJ 2021, the students will gain an insight into the project and get to know, among others, the responsible persons, lecturers and other participants from the partner universities. The focus is on the acquisition of competences by the participants: Working in international teams using current digital tools; developing basic journalistic skills such as research or interviewing as well as creating multimedia journalistic contributions.
Challenges of international online teaching
In the run-up, the “how?” was a major challenge. Not only did we have to take the semester times and timetables of all the partner universities into account, but also the time difference between the individual countries also had to be considered. And the intercultural experiences that such a project usually thrives on are difficult or impossible to recreate virtually. Didactically, the online ISMJ is therefore based on elements of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), a concept for cooperation between universities in different countries. The principle behind it: Students work together online with students from other universities as part of their studies at their university and are given interactive tasks to work on in internationally mixed teams.
Further details and all previous project works can be found on the project page at https://multimediajournalism.eu/.
About the International School of Multimedia Journalism (ISMJ):The ISMJ is run by the Study Program Journalism & Media Management of the FHWien University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication together with the Ukrainian Catholic University Lemberg (UCU School of Journalism). It is a joint programme that networks Austrian and Ukrainian journalism students and promotes an understanding of international media systems and the media landscape in both countries. In the second year of its existence, the International School of Multimedia Journalism has received two further project partners: the Danish School of Media and Journalism (DMJX) and the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA). |