“Innovation and Entrepreneurship” is the name of the capstone class in the Journalism program at UH Mānoa, setting up expectations that the course also has been delivering. That class, JOUR 481, taught by Program Director Brett Oppegaard, has been chosen once again to represent the College of Social Sciences in the university-wide Innovation and Impact Showcase this Fall.
During this competition cycle, Oppegaard’s focus was on collaboration with Civil Beat, which has been named the best overall news site in Hawaiʻi for 13 years in a row by the Society of Professional Journalists Hawaiʻi Chapter.
The plan for the class was to simulate as closely as possible for the students what working at Civil Beat would be like, from story pitching to reporting to writing to editing, and then to offer those finished stories to Civil Beat for potential publication on the site. Civil Beat editors liked the idea so much that they created a special section of the website for the UH students, called UH Beat, where students now have published more than 100 professional-quality stories in this partnership.
“The world is changing fast, in many ways, and especially with media,” Oppegaard said. “We aim to keep all of our classes on that cutting edge of seeking what’s next for Journalism in the 21st century, while also maintaining and keeping our roots deep in our field’s rich and well-developed history. We want to build on the truth-telling strategies that have always worked but also create new ways of sharing information that create better public discourse and a more-just society.”
During the previous Innovation and Impact Showcase competition at UH, in 2021-2022, Oppegaard’s JOUR 481 class also was chosen to represent the College of Social Sciences for his work with students on his Mānoa Public Art app (for iOS or Android), for which the students created experimental journalistic content on mobile devices that was both place-based, connected by GPS coordinates, and interactive.
From a wider perspective, as program director, Oppegaard has been creating novel approaches to curricular assessment as well, which earned him two awards this semester as part of the university-wide Assessment for Curricular Improvement Poster Exhibit. His work on assessment in the Journalism program this year, illustrated by his poster, earned recognition for “Best Faculty Engagement Strategies” and “Best Use of Assessment for Improvement” awards. Those efforts included the creation of new Student Learning Outcomes and a new curricular map for the program and also the introduction of a new Journalism Student Leadership Council, giving students more voice and agency in the development of programmatic initiatives, which has led to such activities as the creation of The Mānoa Mirror Instagram channel, populated by and managed by students.