Student Run Charity Campaigns
Debora Wenger is an Associate Professor in Journalism. She developed a service learning project for her large online class of 300 enrollments.
One of the biggest challenges in a large online class is getting students to work with and learn from each other. Since students often learn best by doing, I wanted to get them using the media tools and strategies we were learning about in Introduction to Mass Communication.
I developed a service learning project that required students to support a local non-profit or raise awareness for an issue. I used the grouping function in Blackboard to divide a class of 300 into small groups of 5-6 students. My colleague Mikki Harris and I introduced the teams to Google tools for collaboration and then we interacted with each of those groups in a series of project checkpoints along the way. The goal was to get students to understand how social and traditional media, and PR and advertising are used to influence and inform audiences. We also hope that the collaboration tools the students used will help them build digital competencies to help them regardless of the fields they ultimately enter.
-Debora Wenger
Journalism Instruction
2015 WOW! Grant Recipient