THE CASE FOR LEARNING ABOUT MEDIA ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN IMPORTANT GATEWAY TO YOUR FUTURE If you are enrolled in a journalism or communications program, you should shudder if your school never teaches you how to post stories to a content management system. You should flinch if you hear the word “convergence“[1] dominating course offerings but never hear about design thinking or audience-engagement strategies. And while you should pursue grammar literacy, be wary if you are not learning how to parse the language and patterns of disruptive innovation, particularly the media disruption happening in front of you daily. As U.S. journalism and mass communications programs revamp to prepare you to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving media landscape, there is—bar none—no better place to embrace and refine nearly every skill you will need to know than learning about media entrepreneurship and innovation. In the course of envisioning, prototyping and launching, you will integrate multimedia production, social media distribution, design thinking,[2] data collection and analysis, and audience engagement strategies. As added benefits, you will develop business skills, begin to understand how to develop a product, how to discover customers, and how to manage all these activities so that you can deliver a new entrepreneurial startup. Or you may go the intrapreneurial route and spearhead a new venture inside your existing media organization.
Type of Material:
Open Textbook
Recommended Uses:
Individual, self-paced, reading, homework
This could be a required or supplemental text for entreprenurship courses, communications, or media strategies course
Technical Requirements:
Mozilla Firefox 74.0
Browser; Adobe Acrobat reader to view the download version of the text.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
Understand digital smarts to interact with customers/users
Identify business/entrepreneurial opportunities
Engage audiences
Develop data skills
Build revenues
Pitch ideas
Target Student Population:
Upper-division media students
Upper-division advertising students
Upper-division entrepreneur students
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
A basic business, marketing, or communications background.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
Content is clear and concise
Could be adapted easily to a course or as a stand-alone material
Gives good definitions and strong, fairly recent examples
The text provides good foundations and applications for entrepreneurs, and students studying entrepreneurship.
Each module contains clear learning objectives.
Topics are clearly identified, and the sequence of topics is appropriate.
Concerns:
Could use more examples and visuals throughout
Rapidly changing/updating field, so will need constant updating
Somewhat dense with text in places
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
Easy to integrate into a course as a text resource
Chapters divided into segments for efficiency
Identifies learning objectives that can be integrated and measured
Activities built into the chapters
Individual topics/units could be assigned for specific content coverage
As an open text, instructors can adapt the usage as best fits into the course
Concerns:
No pre-requisite information
Could use a bit more building on concepts
While much of the information comes from the arena of journalism, there is a strong component that requires some solid business foundational learning.
There does not appear to be much in that will actively engage students. It is basically reading material.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
Very easy to use – just a text
Instructions (aka read) are clear
Mostly accessible, no major accessibility issues
Quite responsive, clean, concise, and consistent in design.
Appears that the publishers have address accessibility issues--with a discussion/statement included with instructor resources.
Concerns:
Could use more visuals to be more engaging in the more text dense chapters
There is a link for instructor resources, which basically provide videos on how to use the text, and then Innovation Icebreakers videos.
Instructors will need to develop their own assignments, quizzes and test materials if needed.
Other Issues and Comments:
Will have to keep on top for most recent examples as it is a field that is constantly evolving
Some chapters are text dense, so more visuals
Could integrate videos
Creative Commons:
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