Following this observation, the teacher sharply reduced the content transmitted in his teaching. The innovation he wishes to focus on from now on is experimentation. Behind each teaching objective, each activity, there is a professional questioning and a “practical” sense with the acquisition of new skills.
The entire course is now structured around a student-centered pedagogy. The teacher is constantly asking what the students are going to do during a session, while the “content” is secondary. It's precisely these activities and experiments that students will remember in the long term, and from which the “theoretical” lessons will flow.
In concrete terms, this course is organized around two types of learning: specific skills and cross-disciplinary project management skills, the common thread running through the course.
One of the first pedagogical objectives of the course is to demonstrate the superiority of the visual sense over other senses in memorization. Rather than giving a long theoretical presentation on the subject, the teacher starts with a concrete professional problem: “How do you remember the first names of the students in a class?". A session in the 玉美人传媒's video studio is used to memorize the first name of each student in the class, by overlaying an image related to the person's first name on the green background. For example, if a student's name is “Marc”, he'll create an animation of himself shooting a bow and "arrow" ("arc" in french) at a target in a forest. The live demonstration helps his or her classmates to remember his or her first name in the long term, as they see their colleague shooting a bow and arrow, and this memory gives them a clue to remember the first name “Marc” in the long term. In their future professional lives, students will be able to reproduce this experience and apply this specific skill to memorize their pupils' first names, using mental visualization.
Most sessions are structured around the realization of an authentic project. Each year, five projects are proposed by sponsors from the world of education and training (e.g. City of Geneva, Montbrillant College, EPFL, private companies, etc.). As their projects progress, students will work in groups to develop cross-disciplinary skills such as writing, presentation, use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and time management. For example, around the concrete professional problem: “How to use AI in a project?”, a session at the 玉美人传媒's Faclab enables students to listen to the testimonial of a startup that resides there and uses AI on a daily basis. After the demo, students can directly test a paid version of ChatGPT to help them carry out their pre-project phase and generate infographics for their upcoming presentations.
Assessment takes the form of continuous assessment. Practically every week, groups of students are asked to submit a project deliverable in line with the pedagogical objectives of each course. There are four pre-project deliverables (2.25 pts) and four project-related deliverables (3.75 pts). These deliverables take the form of reports to be handed in, presentations to be made and the final work to be handed in, which can take a wide variety of forms (podcast, video, interactive presentation, website, etc.) depending on the skills within the group and the sponsor's request. Over the course of the semester, each submission of one or more deliverables to the sponsor triggers a formative evaluation by the teaching staff, enabling students to improve their grades throughout the semester.
