EYES ON THE RISE CLASES ( Syllabi for individual faculty offerings may be found here )

JOU 4341C Multimedia Capstone: Journalism and Public Storytelling via Mobile Virtual Reality

Robert Gutsche

This class is designed to prepare students for heightened critical thinking skills related to visual storytelling, to enhance the technological production of digital work, and to improve innovations in digital storytelling that students will be able to express in trade and professional publications, as well as in faculty-led, refereed articles. The course focuses on building the Mobile Virtual Reality Lab to cover the “unseen” of sea level rise.

DIG4800 Digital Theories: Moving Toward a Sense of Media Control

Robert Gutsche

This course prepares students for heightened critical thinking skills related to digital storytelling, therefore, will create a VR product that introduces users to the interactive and daily experiences of sea level rise, a story that has since been difficult to tell given the “hidden” nature of rising seas in South Florida.

MMC 4631 Audience Analysis, Public Opinion, and New Media: Understanding Audiences in (Virtual) Space

Robert Gutsche

This course is designed to examine the cultural elements of media production and interaction. Part of this course will focus on funded research provided by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute to examine audience response to multimedia and interactive news projects delivered on laptop/desktop and mobile platforms. This course also uses the SCJ’s Mobile Virtual Reality Lab to engage students in creating and interpreting meanings via new technologies. Grounded in scholarship on audiences and media research, students in this course – through practice and study – will gain a deeper understanding of message creation and meaning-making.

JOU 4341C Senior Multimedia Project

Juliet Pinto, Robert Gutsche

Students will use this capstone course to collaborate with community members, faculty, and other students in setting an editorial agenda for the Eyes on the Rise project. This capstone course is designed to teach students to cover the news using multimedia formats and is the culmination of the skills and concepts they have learned in previous journalism studies. Students are expected to produce multimedia news stories of local interest using storytelling skills in print, video and audio/visual formats. Learning objectives include news story development; news content production; integration of written articles with digital photography, video, audio and social media and demonstration of entrepreneurial skills needed for journalism in the digital age.

JOU 4001 | VIC 4001 Visual Storytelling and Production

Susan Jacobson, Robert Gutsche

Focused this semester on the Eyes on the Rise project, this course is designed to enhance multimedia production skills. By the end of the semester, students will: Understand the legal and ethical issues facing journalists and other communication professionals who work with digital tools on the Internet; further their understanding of audio-visual production techniques; improve their abilities to research multi-media news stories; produce an extended info-graphic, an audio slideshow, and a multi-source video on the class themes of sea level rise and climate change; and produce two multimedia packages. The course has been designed to provide content to eyesontherise.org and other projects with community and journalistic engagement.

MMC 4936 Mapping Sea Level Rise for Media | Web GIS for Journalists

Susan Jacobson, Jennifer Fu

Web GIS is a special topics course designed to give students a solid foundation in Web publishing and Web GIS. By the end of the semester, students will: Learn the basics of HTML5 and CSS3; learn the basics of JavaScript and JQuery; participate in a crowdsourced project on King Tide Day; produce an interactive photo slideshow with HTML5/CSS3; Participate in a mobile-social reporting project on Election Day; and produce a multimedia map story with HTML5/CSS3.

RTV 3260 Multimedia Production

Kate MacMillin, Robert Gutsche

This course is designed to introduce students to the basic elements of multimedia production: Audio recording and editing, basic photography, video production and editing; interactive info-graphics; and the basic functions of a Web platform. These will be presented through comprehensive multimedia websites. Students will create websites focusing on a sea level rise theme, issue, topic or ongoing event/story that they will follow throughout the course of the semester as they populate their websites. They will become fully immersed in what it means to tell stories in an online environment.

RTV 4101 Writing for Television

Kate MacMillin

This course is intended to introduce the student to various types of writing for television and Internet/journalism videos. This will include storytelling for short videos and short documentaries. Class time will be divided among lectures, guest speakers, shooting and video editing workshops. The course will be devoted to various approaches to video storytelling around ONE TOPIC: Sea Level Rise. There will be numerous opportunities for serious reporting on this issue.

MMC 6402 Theories of Mass Communication (Miami Ad School)


Robert Gutsche

This class introduces communication theory and cultural theory as they apply to the strategic communication of messages to specific audiences. The course introduces students to academic research and its application through community engagement. The class is project-based and aligned with eyesontherise.org, a grant-funded project focused on sea level rise. The purpose of this project is to conduct research that will guide an advertising and social marketing campaign to increase awareness about sea level rise in South Florida and change related behaviors. The work will be grounded in the theories examined throughout the course.