How Facility Facelifts Keep Colleges Competitive Prepare Students for the Work World

Cornog says the new HD and 4K equipment encourages students to think about the problems and opportunities digital journalism will “deliver down the line,” especially as mobile devices evolve.

“That’s another area where it seems to be closer to the cutting edge than most of our competitors,” he says. “It’s giving us an opportunity to explore stuff in the curriculum and in the co-curricular work that I hope will prepare our students to be leaders when they get out of here and go off into the various fields they’re going to work in.”

Ball State University‘s (BSU) recent reconstruction is similar to Hofstra’s mission to keep its journalism pedagogies and technologies current and ahead of competitors.

The school completed its Unified Media Lab (UML), an on-campus media building, which is broken up into individual spaces for students to learn about and practice journalism.

While the new space was constructed to house multiple media stations, such as the editor stations, AVID stations and iMAC stations, the UML gives students the opportunity to collaborate on the same story.

The UML also functions off of a technology ecosystem that is primarily comprised of Grass Valley solutions.

Jerry Pierce, technician for the Department of Journalism at BSU, says this setup makes the university’s journalism program shine.

“Our biggest challenge was bringing together all of our student media groups in one place instead of being in separate buildings,” he says. “It was a big challenge. Other universities have done similar things, but our difference is doing it all in one, greatly designed room, and how it’s integrated with our curriculum. That’s our big difference here.”

In addition to preparing students for a journalism career, the UML has attracted the eyes of prospective employers.

“We’ve had some major broadcast companies look at our students and say, “hey, do you know how to use an automated control room system?” We have students who are learning how to do that now,” says Terry Heifetz, instructor of telecommunications at BSU. “Usually [after looking at] a resume, a company will say, “do you understand the concept of how this works?” And whether [students] use the Grass Valley system or one of their competitors, the concepts are the same. That makes them that much more employable.”

While the UML has had success with teaching journalism students, Heifetz says there are still some students who are nervous about working in the newsroom environment.

He says journalism instructors are working to make sure students are more than comfortable in this space so that they can use it to its full advantage, and prepare them for a real-world news space.

“The biggest challenge is getting more people to use it, and that’s only because I think some people are still intimidated by, “oh my goodness this is a big production studio,” until people realize they can [use] it and do what they need to do,” Heifetz says.