By  Felix Ortiz (whetstone Contributor)

Carl Parker and Marlon McNeill in Mac Lab | Whetstone

Carl Parker and Marlon McNeill in Mac Lab

The Media Arts department at Wesley College is expecting great things to come out of the new Integrated Media course scheduled to be available for juniors during the 2013-2014 school year.

The course will be a collaboration of the concentrations and skills students learned from their previous media courses.

“We expect students to have basic skills in writing, video, web, and digital media,” said Professor Victor Greto, adviser to Wesley’s independent campus newspaper The Whetstone. These are the basic underlying requirement for students who are Media Arts majors.

Students will exhibit the skills they have learned from previous courses, including Media Aesthetics, Digital Media Literacy and Writing for Media.

The course is still being discussed among the faculty.

Dr. Tery Griffin said she is looking forward to students becoming “work- and skill-ready.”

She also said times were changing in the media world and the department needed a more digital component to keep up with today’s instantaneous lifestyle. Smartphones and the Internet make it easier to capture an event around campus live and instantly have it available online for students to see for themselves.

The course will have students working in different teams, doing a wide range of assignments that will help prepare them for what it is like to work in the field with more than one concentration or technique. It will help develop a deeper understanding of the way media is produced by allowing students to use their individual ideas and teamwork. The class will produce content for Wesley’s media outlets, which include The Whetstone, WCTV and WXStream, Wesley’s private radio network.

“I’m looking forward to the challenge of actually being in the field,” said Media Arts major Evan Collotti. “It should be interesting to see all of the skill we were taught in previous classes come together.”

Brian Baker, another Media Arts major, was also optimistic about the chance to utilize his skills in other areas of the media.

“I think it will be a really cool opportunity,” he said. “It’s going to be a really involved class since there are three classes in one.”