JOUR 125: Multimedia Storytelling

Alignment, Engagement, Accountability

Course Description

Catalog Description: Principles and techniques of reporting and writing news for radio, television, podcasts, social media, and other emerging media platforms. Field and laboratory experience, including basic multimedia story production.

Course Description: The best stories integrate you into an experience where you can lose yourself in the beauty of narration. Multimedia storytellers reveal the hidden layers of a story by strategically using a combination of elements such as text, audio, photographs, videos, graphics and more. This skills-based course will help you practice the principles and techniques required when reporting for social media, podcasts, television and other emerging platforms. You will learn how to package engaging pieces of content and take audiences on a journey they’ll want to revisit.

Elective: This course is currently offered in the Fall and Spring as an elective for COMS majors. Students from across the discipline participate in the course, but most belong to the journalism and public relations programs. The 25-student course is categorized as discussion-based, but it combines discussion and laboratory work so students learn the fundamentals of writing, film, design and audio techniques before putting them into practice.

Overview of the Redesign Project

The 2024-2025 academic year was my first time teaching at Sacramento State, and so I was teaching JOUR 125 for the first time and continuously adjusting on the fly. It wasn’t until the end of the year that I could fully take a step back and assess the course’s effectiveness. While I felt the goals of the course and assignment instructions were evident, I realized that students needed clearer language and more direction in order to feel confident while completing their work. So, my redesign focused on creating a more student-friendly syllabus, adjusting assignment requirements for more detailed guidance and rubrics for more specific criteria, and increasing class engagement through attendance accountability. This was all done with the intention of better executing the journalism program’s goal for students, which is to prepare them to succeed in media-related jobs by emphasizing writing and editing for interactive media.

1. 1. Student-Friendly Syllabus: I enlisted the help of ChatGPT to adjust my course’s five core objectives to ensure they aligned with my course description, overview, and goal. Initially, I wanted to decrease the page count of my syllabus to five pages (based on ChatGPT’s recommendation for a detailed and comprehensive syllabus) to encourage more students to read it in its entirety. After trying to cut information and realizing it was not possible, I had ChatGPT create a one-page syllabus snapshot for the course that I then redesigned in Canvas and handed out to students on the first day of school. It included the most important details from the syllabus so that if the snapshot were the only thing students read, they would still have a good understanding of course expectations and requirements.
  2. Assignment Requirements & Rubrics: During the 2024-2025 academic year, many students had repeated questions about assignment instructions and mentioned that the rubric criteria were sometimes vague. I even noticed the latter coming into play for myself while grading assignments because the rubrics weren’t specific enough for me to consistently assess the material. Creative work tends to be subjective anyway, so I wanted to ensure I had the right language to validate my assessment of student work. I noticed this issue the most with a social media assignment called “Translate That Story,” so I chose to redesign the assignment and rubric to test whether the students’ experience completing the work and my experience grading it improved.
  3. Class Engagement & Accountability: I was warned not to include attendance as a part of students’ grades when I first arrived at Sacramento State. Many professors expressed that attendance drops significantly after the first three to five weeks and that students are more likely to fail if they do so. As I went through the semesters, I noticed some students were able to pass the courses by attending only 60% of class sessions, and some would leave right in the middle of a lecture without saying a word. I realized students have no incentive to attend class and participate without any stakes. So I decided to implement a ticket-out-the-door system where I take attendance at the beginning of class and require students to submit a Canvas quiz at the end of class to receive participation and attendance credit. So, students must be present throughout the session to complete exercises and engage with the material.

Assessment of the Redesign Project

This table shows three ways I assessed my course redesign.
Student-Friendly Syllabus	Assignment Requirements & Rubrics	Class Engagement & Accountability
This is a one-page snapshot of the course syllabus where I lay out all the essential information students need to succeed. Syllabi can be boring to read and look at, so I designed the syllabus in Canva to make it cute and engaging by using the same graphic skills I teach in class. That way, they can also use the snapshot as an example of design work. Throughout the semester, I’ve noticed a decrease in student outreach regarding basic syllabus questions, which has created less frustration for me as the instructor and allowed us to focus more on learning skills.	OLD RUBRIC NEW RUBRIC The criteria and ratings for this assignment were much more specific. This allowed me to accurately and fairly assess students’ submitted work. The overall grade average decreased from 90% in Spring 2025 to 82% in Fall 2025. I didn’t take this as a bad sign because I was aware I had softly graded this assignment last semester due to vague criteria, and the updated language provided better guidance.	I take attendance at the beginning of every class session, but students must also submit their own attendance at the end of class to secure full credit for the day. Since adding attendance as part of grading, I’ve only experienced one instance of a student leaving without saying a word, which used to consistently happen, and I have seen a major improvement in attendance. There has been perfect attendance in five of our sessions this semester, and seven sessions where only one student was missing (as of Nov. 19). This is the best attendance I’ve seen in any of my classes since teaching. I believe this is due to a combination of factors: 1) Holding students accountable for their attendance, 2) Increasing class engagement through intentional group work, demonstrations, and student share-out sessions, and 3) The fact that a majority of students are transfers.

Reflection

The biggest challenge of this redesign project was not overdoing it. There were many elements of the course that I wanted to adjust, but I had to be realistic about my capacity and focus on a few intentional changes I could complete. As a result of these adjustments, I feel that students and I have gained more clarity. We have clearer and more realistic expectations for one another, and I’ve found that when students underperform on assignments, their responses are more positive. Instead of complaining about the grade itself, they either express understanding of the feedback or a desire to review their techniques together. Moving forward, I want to focus even more energy on creating an active learning environment where I take students outside of the classroom to participate in theater-led workshops, tour local news organizations, and more.

Faculty Biography

This table includes my faculty biography.
	Amari Pollard is a digital storyteller dedicated to creating space for overlooked narratives within news, culture, wellness and sports. She’s an Assistant Professor of Multimedia Journalism at California State University, Sacramento who has worked in audience development for companies such as Syracuse.com, The Week, and NYTimes’s Wirecutter. Pollard has co-hosted ESPN’s lacrosse half-time show “Sound On With Tari & Amari” and the podcast “Sufficiently Black,” and is currently a news reader for PBS KVIE’s News Minute. Her writing has been featured in The Week, MindbodyGreen, Bustle, VeryWell, Reader’s Digest, Inside Lacrosse, NYMI SOJO, and more. Pollard’s debut poetry collection, “Where There Are Flowers and the Moon,” was released in December 2024.

**Program Sponsors**
	This work was supported by: Sacramento State Academic Affairs - Center for Teaching and Learning