Tag Archives: accrediting standards

How do students become well-rounded in media skills while abiding by accreditation restrictions?

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by Alexa Lopez
English Education graduate student, University of Florida

Before this year, the curriculum at the University of Miami’s School of Communication had been set in a way that restricted the content and number of courses that students, including myself, could take as they pursued their degrees.

For instance, according to the school’s bulletin for 2010-2011, which I fell under, I could only take up to 42 credits in the school as part of the journalism program; the remaining 78 credits for my degree had to come from non-communication courses taken for a required second major plus electives.

Also, if you took more than the capped amount of credits allotted for your program in the School of Communication, you had to take that same number of credits outside of the School of Communication. That is, if I wanted to take an extra three-credit course in the School of Communication (resulting in a total of 45 communication credits), I had to balance it with another three-credit course in an outside school.

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Developing a college course: You’re part of a big picture of curriculum procedures and accrediting standards

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When you develop a course syllabus, you are part of a much bigger process that includes your own department’s curriculum, the university’s curriculum guidelines, and accrediting standards.

At the University of Florida, every college is required to develop measureable student learning outcomes (SLOs) and to collect data on every student in the college. This new requirement is due to an upcoming accrediting assessment of UF in 2014 by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Faculty are to use the student results of the assessment of the SLOs to evaluate and improve teaching and learning.

As a college, we also have accrediting standards from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC), the accrediting component of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Communications programs are evaluated on nine accrediting standards. Standard 2 is Curriculum and Instruction.

Take a quick read though Standard 2 — professional values and competencies and the indicators for assessment — and consider those factors in relation to the course that you would like to teach.

The curriculum of communications programs has become a hot topic of discussion in the last couple of years. Programs are grappling with how to respond to the changes going on in the media industry. Some say that time spent on teaching hardware and software takes away from teaching the fundamentals. Others say that the changes in the media industry have changed what the fundamentals are.

Read An Open Letter to America’s University Presidents that was written by the leaders of six major grant-awarding foundations that have been funders of initiatives in communications and higher education. The letter was published Aug. 3, 2012, and has caused some lively debate.

Also read “Not So Fast,” one of the many responses countering the letter.