Dubai: Zayed University (ZU) has revamped its entire media and communications curriculum in an attempt to become the leading programme in the UAE and the rest of the region.
The complete overhaul of the curriculum is benchmarked to the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, a leading US communications accrediting body.
"We decided to clear the table and rebuild the entire curriculum from the ground up and that's what we've done," said Professor Marilyn Roberts, Dean of ZU's College of Communications and Media Sciences. "A great deal of research actually went into this."
Keeping up with industry
Professor Roberts took up her role two years ago this month. It was her primary objective to align ZU's media and communications curriculum with that of the UAE's media industry - the new curriculum was rolled out in September last year.
"What we've done is listened to the voices on our international and local advisory boards," she said. "We've looked at benchmark programmes and built our own."
"Often at times academia may be slow to respond to industry changes but what we are trying to do is keep up with them," said Professor Roberts.
The idea of the new curriculum is for every majoring student in the college of media and communications to be equipped with the fundamentals of story telling on various platforms; a drastic move away from ZU's former compartmentalised media education.
‘It was not required of every single student to have basic media story telling or writing skills, it was more compartmentalised," she said. "Whereas we now believe as a faculty that before students specialise, we've got to focus on making solid communicators out of them."
Students enrolled on the old curriculum have been slowly transitioned into the ways of the new system and are ensured their graduation dates will not be affected.
However, they, along with new students enrolled into the college will experience strengthened Arabic language communication skills to cater to a choice of careers in the Arabic or English media; as well as much more practical, hands-on experience.
"Another thought in our curriculum is what we are calling the ZU media lab experience where what they are taught they actually do," said Professor Roberts. "This way they begin building their skill sets higher and adding more different mediums into the whole frame of story telling."
The media ethics and media law topics on the curriculum have now been separated with an aim to be reinforced in all classes.
"Another thing in our core we are excited about is everyone will take media history," she said. "Not only will they learn about the bench mark communication milestones, but students will also be learning the history of the UAE and the Gulf Media."
Such drastic changes seem to be serving ZU well as it has seen an increase on its already 300 strong student body in the college of media and communications.
"We are now experiencing more intake on the media programmes," said Professor Roberts.
