This week we were instructed to sign up for the NewsU course, Five Steps to MultiMedia Storytelling. Click this link and you’ll be taken to the course. If you’ve ready my past blogs about the NewsU courses then you know how much I dislike these additional online courses we have to take. So here is my reaction to the course…
In this course we learned how to put together a story board, what to pack when you’re going to shoot an interview, etc. I felt like everything we learned in this course was pretty much common sense. One of the tasks we had to complete was matching items such as water, extra batteries, and lense cleaner up with their description. The description for lense cleaner was something like “there are smudges on your camera causing images to be blurry.” Well then obviously you would need some lense cleaner to wipe them off. I didn’t need an online course to tell me that. I was surprised by how elementary this course was. Matching every day items with their description? Really? We needed to take a class to learn to pack a bottle of water should we be outside all day when it’s 95 degree shooting an interview or commercial? Really? I guess I should be happy these courses are rather easy, but to me they’re a huge waste of time. I’m not interested in learning more about multimedia storytelling because it’s not a field that I find very interesting.
I’m soooo glad this is the last NewsU course we have to take because I didn’t enjoy or get much (if anything) out of them. Hope everyone is having a good semester! 
After reading your post, I really started to think about the NewU Labs and all that goes along with them weekly. I feel like they are a little bit of a waste of time myself. In essence, I see the point of them and that they are suppose to be ‘fun’ ways to learn about different aspects of the news and public relations, and in this case multimedia, however they are time consuming and I don’t like the fact we have to send a report in because I am always worried that I didn’t spend a sufficient amount of time on each lab. But like you said, luckily this is the last one, and we made it through them all, hopefully learning something without realizing it!
[...] April 19, 2010 Megan Long’s blog [...]
I felt the same way! It seems like it was just a bunch of common sense. And I know how you feel about these courses. We already have hours and hours of homework in this class so why in the world are we having to take 5 ADDITIONAL courses. It’s super frustrating. And I’m sooooo glad too that it was our last course.
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