What will you learn
What will you learn
All programs of study in the Faculty of Mass Communication and Fine Arts are well defined by a set of learning objectives and outcomes. They represent different types of skills that are much needed by the communication and media industries.
The common learning outcomes, shared by all the four majors offered by the faculty, can be classified in terms of knowledge skills, thinking skills, subject-based practical skills and skills of life and work.
The learning outcomes are the result of different types of courses making up each of the majors of study. These courses are classified as University General Education Requirements (GER), Liberal Arts General Education Electives (GEE), Core Requirements (CR), Major Requirements (MR), and Technical Electives (TE).
What are these majors designed to achieve?
MCFA offers a program of study in four majors. These majors are designed to give you the opportunity to:
- Acquire knowledge and develop an understanding of the character and content of the general or specific mediated activities at different scales of communication within a stimulating environment of learning and teaching.
- Make media and develop skills in media and communication pre-production, production and post-production.
- Undertake work-based experiential learning in the field of interest and be able to report about it;
Complete an independent research and/or production project in relevant areas of your study.
Knowledge Skills
The knowledge skills are a set of cognitive abilities learned to carry out specific theoretical tasks required in a domain of study and area of professional practice. The program of study should enable students:
- To acquire the relevant political, economic, cultural, intellectual and aesthetic aspects of communication and media production, institutions, texts and audiences to understand the character, social and professional influences of media communication;
- To make sense of latest technologies, practices and techniques of media communication pre-production, production and post-production and become familiar with a range of interdisciplinary approaches to studying communication and media forms and processes;
- To utilize a comparative understanding of the media in national and global contexts with the intent of fostering a productive and proactive indigenous and creative output in the local and regional cultural industries.
Thinking Skills
The thinking skills are part of a set of meta-cognitive aptitudes that enable to construct rational relations that are characterized by position-taking effects in a particular domain of study. The program of study should allow students:
- To develop a critically informed framework of analysis of media communication texts, audiences, practices and institutions;
- To engage critically with the main thinkers, debates and intellectual theories and paradigms in the field;
- To conceptualize the links between theory and practice and how they have a role in providing the features of the mass communication processes and outputs;
- To reflect critically on the processes of production and their functions in instilling power relations in your own, and in others’ media and communication systems;
- To examine and scrutinize the complexities of communication and media cultures, and their systemic changes in their institutional environment.
Subject-Based Practical Skills
The subject-based practical skills are dispositions internalized from repeated implementation of the knowledge and thinking skills in a specialized domain of study. The program of study should provide students opportunities to put into practice the following:
- Competence in relevant communication and media technologies and techniques including the skills involved in reporting, editing, lighting, photography, directing and effective manipulation of sound, image and/or written word in both conventional and digital contexts;
- Competence in writing skills in different mediated genres such as scripting and story-boarding and preparation of treatments and synopses.
- Competence in creating dynamic spaces of engagement with a range of audiences within a framework of empowering the role of the proactive audience in generating and counter-generating meanings.
Skills for life and work
The skills for life and work are those supplementary matrices of aptitudes that apply to general domains and diversified contexts, allowing students to adapt with involvement in different social interactions and institutions. The program of study combines to the above set of skills to enable students to carry out the following:
- Working independently and as part of a team to organize and manage tasks and workload of different types and complexity media work in an effective way
- Researching and reporting different types of domains related to the cultural industries with a learning outcome on how to plan and design research projects; how to locate, select and synthesize sources of information in a professional context;
- Communicating effectively and confidently on how to present ideas and information accurately and responsibly in diversified mediated contexts and institutions