Feedback May 2002 (Vol 43 No 2)

These teachers will also offer a number of supporting courses, whose subject matteris deemed to have special relevance for the projects carried out within the projectforum. For example, the supervisors of the TV and Video Production Forum usuallyoffer two supporting courses, one being a workshop for acquiring the production skillsneeded in order to do, say, a short TV documentary, the other being a moretheoretically and analytically oriented course about narrative forms and visualaesthetics. Both project fora and the supporting courses are described in the semester’scourse catalogue, which is also available on the program website (for a look at theEnglish website, see www.comm.ruc.dk). Not all courses are defined specifically inrelation to project fora, but deal with other important areas of communication studiesthat students may want to know about.Students apply for membership in a project forum after perhaps sitting in on two orthree different fora during the first two weeks of the semester. Most students have abroad impression of the kind of project idea they would like to work on, but may notbe certain as to which forum it fits into, as the fora overlap to some extent. Whileshopping around in the different project fora, students get a chance both to form animpression of the supervisors available in each and to find fellow students who sharetheir specific interest. Then follows a negotiation phase during which project ideas arefine-tuned and assesses by supervisors for feasibility.Once a project topic has been decided on, the members of the project group choosethe courses which they deem appropriate for the group’s learning process. Figure 1shows two examples of how membership of a specific project forum may lead groupmembers to choose courses that may serve as a theoretical, methodological andanalytical input to their work. Students must take three courses per semester, earningthem one third of the credits points they need in order to pass that semester, leavingtwo thirds for the project.The project processOnce an academically challenging project topic has been defined, a teacher isappointed as supervisor for the student group. For the rest of the semester, then, thestudent group will work together towards the ‘solution’ of the communication problemthey started out with, in close consultation with the supervisor, relying on face-to-faceencounters as well as using state-of-the-art software for computer-mediatedcommunication. Figure 2 provides a chronological outline of the main stages of theproject process.4Feedback May 2002 (Vol. 43, No. 2)