Creating media leaders for the UAE

The Zayed Media Lab at Zayed University, Dubai campus, is helping to build a student’s mass media skills through a course that mimics the real world media environment

It began with a small group of educators asking. “Why not?”

With the speedy growth of the media and a variety of message dispersal methods, this small group of determined educators asked “Why not combine courses in information gathering, information design and media writing into one seamless course that teaches through real world projects the skills of mass communication?”

Thus was born the Zayed Media Lab, a new mass media teaching concept that its creators at Zayed University in Dubai think is nothing less than the future of mass media education.

Dr Jack Hillwig and Dr James Piecowye, two professors in Zayed University’s College of Communication and Media Sciences, embraced the concept, created the prototype and are executing it with amazing results.

“Zayed Media Lab has resulted in beginning-level students thinking coherently about media messages and how to get those messages across to audiences in ways that are truly 21st century thinking,” said Hillwig.

Added Piecowye: “The media today is rapidly changing to meet the demands of the increasingly discerning consumer.

"Why shouldn’t the education of those who will create the content for these evolving media be in a manner that will allow them to keep up with the rapidly-changing career path they are going to enter upon graduation?”

The essence of a message

At the Zayed Media Lab, communication and media science students learn to think differently and to work both as individuals and as a team from the first hour of entry into the three courses consisting of reporting, writing and design. Students devote two days a week to these classes.

Students are taught that content and design are the essence of any message and that every message has to be seen as a little problem in itself.

The lab provides the elements that allow a student to explore the means of structuring varied content and arriving at a design that best allows that content to reach the audience in an imaginative yet effective way.

The lab operates on the concept of integrating a student’s knowledge. “The message may be in the form of a news story, a traditional narrative story, a photo story, a piece of graphic art or may be even a fictional story,” said Hillwig.

“It may be best disseminated by a website, a poster, a magazine piece, an exhibition or even a book or a film. The key is getting students to see the reporting, writing and design processes as all working together to result in successful and powerful media.”

Said Piecowye, “Students are encouraged to try out their ideas and learn from their setbacks.”

What is probably unique about the lab is that the course is built around real-world projects. The students and not the teachers set the pace of these projects and the course itself.

“Each project,” explained Piecowye, “begins as something the student thinks she will never be able to do - a grand adventure.”

According to the professor, nothing about the Zayed Media Lab is conventional. “And it is the fact that the course truly mimics the real-world environment that makes it such a powerful experience for the students,” he said.

Zayed Media Lab is about creating future media leaders for the UAE. Media leaders need to be able to dream as well as deliver. The girls who go through the lab can do both with great success, say their professors.

They learn to create websites, produce video documentaries, write out stories and other printed material and take photographs.

“We had 17 written and developed ideas for media projects by 2pm on the first day of class. And some of those ideas were a reality by the end of the second week,” said Hillwig.

Inaugural class

There were 17 students in the inaugural class. They were taught how to gather information, write stories for print and broadcast media and the web, and how to design for the print media and for websites. They were taught through projects produced and distributed on campus, and sometimes beyond.

“One rule of the Zayed Media Lab is that everything the students do will be displayed or distributed as a real world product.

"In today’s world, the key is to get the media to the consumer, to get it seen before others beat you to it, to get your messages out there the quickest,” said Hillwig.

Therefore deadlines are real world and expectations are real world.

“What we have done is to not only educate our students but profoundly change the way they understand their role in the rapidly-developing UAE society,” said Piecowye. “Zayed Media Lab students are nothing short of being recognised as change agents.”

The benefits of the lab extend to the whole educational process at the College of Communication and Media Sciences.

“After going through the course, students have very high expectations of the educational process they are part of.

"Just as they themselves become innovators they expect those who are teaching them to be as innovative and this means the entire education process is being pushed to develop both educationally and creatively,” said Piecowye.

Currently the course is taught at the start of the academic programme in the College of Communication and Media Sciences.

If all goes according to plan, the first groups to pass through the lab will return to it in their last semester of study to revisit the concept.

The writer is a communications and media sciences student at Zayed University