Page 15 - CC Life 13 2015 Spring

Hands-on Project –
Learn As You Do
Dr. Julie Shen
Communication Major Chairperson
Students are like seeds God places in our hands. They
come in different sizes and shapes and you don’t know
what they are. Some of them will grow up to be daisies,
some will be lilies and some will be big trees. All we can
do is water and prune. A hands-on course is like fertilizer.
When a plant receives the right fertilizer, it grows.
The Communication Major was established in 1998
for the purpose of training people to spread the Gospel
through the use of media with the method of learning
through doing. Therefore, our curriculum includes courses
that requires hands-on projects, off campus internship and
graduation production. Students are given a series of tasks
each year they are at the college and those tasks are all
related to a big project. Through taking on different roles, only do the teachers need to pay attention
students learn their strengths and their interests from a
practical point of view. This training has a great influence
on our students’ lives and careers.
Each student has to go through five stages before
graduation. The first stage is to personally deliver the
student practicum magazine, CC Community, to designated
individuals and organizations. The second stage is to
solicit magazine advertisements from businesses. The
third stage is to write news for the magazine. The last two
stages are to intern off campus in a media organizations
for two months and to complete a graduation exhibition.
Let’s take CC Community as an example. Our goal
is to produce a publically published magazine like other
magazines on the market. We want students to locate
resources off campus so they can develop the ability to
work outside of the school environment as they will do
after they graduate. If the college provided them with
sufficient funding, then they would not
know and understand the whole process of
marketing and how it is important to the
media. Therefore, we ask the college to
cover 45% of the cost of running this project
and students to locate support to cover the
other 55%. This is not an easy process. Not
to the changes of the society over time, but
students need to re-adjust their attitudes
when they are turned down as they visit
businesses one by one. In the process,
students learn to overcome obstacles, to
think of different strategies when they are
rejected by people, and to speak differently
to be more convincing. Many students say
that they have become braver and they are
able to learn from their mistakes.
Not only do students publish a paper-
based magazine every month, they also run
their own Facebook page, monitor apps they
promote, and film their own news and post
it on YouTube for the public to see. We are
very proud of our students. Though few in
number, they successfully run such a multi-
product hands-on project.