Abstract:

The teaching of APR has been discussed in pedagogical literature for many years. Today the most contentious debate is whether students should be trained in theory and strategies or in tactics and practical knowledge. The latest technique, which can be called constructivist, focuses on learning through real-world work. However, real-world jobs are long, laborious, and time-consuming to the student. Also, the realistic work seems in line with what some authors found that in their survey of professionals in the sector they showed that perceiving the context of advertising campaigns, and not just tactics, was key to the professionals were of quality.

So far, in this course, the asignments defined for the course were fictitious but being similar to what be a real-life work. Thus, the students have to design and produce an advert for a hypothetical campaign for a fictitious or real company. However, considering what we have just exposed above, we decided to establish some collaboration with a company that required the production of advertising content. Our goal was, on the other hand, that students face real problems that require the development of the learning outcomes acquired in the course, and, on the other hand, we want to check if tackling this real-life problem has an influence in the students’ motivation and performance.

In this paper, we show a study that consisted of a practical assignment defined by a regional newspaper and that was the design of the cover page for one of their special numbers. The influence of the experience in the students has been evaluated by the lecturers and by surveys. This, experience has been carried out in the TAPC course during the first semester of the 2017-2018 academic year. Our teaching methodology is based on the development of theoretical lectures where we taught the different contents associated to digital image and graphic design. Then, in the laboratory, we teach the use of Adobe Photoshop and apply some concepts taught in the theoretical course. Once we have finished the laboratory sessions, we present the assignment to the students. The assignment is based on the requirements of the newspaper.

Once, the experience has finished, we have sent a survey which was designed to evaluate the interest that the students have had for completing the assignment among others. It was structured mostly as Likert-scale questions, and it was answered by the students after the completion of the assignment and its evaluation. The results show that they felt an extra motivation when working for the “real market” since they confirm that this assignment has motivated them to learn more about the course, to work harder and try to present a better assignment than usual. On the other hand, regarding the performance, we have seen that the results are slightly better than the previous course. This is positive although we expected better results. This might be due to the real-life assignment could be more time-consuming as commented in the literature. Indeed, the students considered the assignment to be developed is difficult. Even though, students have considered the experience quite interesting.

Overall the experience has been satisfactory both students and company, and the authors believe that it gives light to the question of whether assignments should be close to reality or more academic in the field of the development of publicity materials created with specific software tools in PR degrees.

Keywords:

Media, Higher Education, PR.