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Public relations students prefer Internet over textbook

Innovative course at the University of New Mexico uses Internet readings instead of traditional textbook -- students give it the thumbs up. DCLnews reports.

When the University of New Mexico asked David L. Geary, a part-time instructor, to teach the "Introduction to Public Relations" course last spring, he discovered something that surprised him. Students were using a new edition of a textbook he had used 10 years before at another school. The new edition was 125 pages shorter than the old edition and cost twice as much -- yet had the same basic material as the 10-year-old edition.

So Geary, who has held top communications posts at the US Departments of Energy and Defense and Lockheed Martin Corp., decided to try something new for his Fall class: He would compile his own Internet-based textbook.

Geary knew that most of the basic points in the textbook had long ago moved to the web. "The basics have not changed over the years, but many of the practices have changed in response to the web," he said.

The Museum of Public Relations website, for example, told of public relations pioneers. A group from Canada had posted its crisis plan on its website.  A community relations survey with lots of statistics was online, as were reviews of new books for PR professionals.

"Articles and case studies from all over the world were easy to find. Websites not only in the United States, but also in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia were helpful," Geary said. "Online public relations newsletters provided inside news that came straight from the headlines."

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All Geary needed now was a plan for the new course and to tie the new readings together. So he dropped the textbook. And projects that required students apply what they learned from the Internet replaced exams.

Students received their Internet assignments with "hot links" in their e-mails, which meant a reading was only ever a click of the mouse away. They visited more than 100 websites and read or scanned what they found. Some sites even had videos that students could watch on their computers.

To tie all the Internet readings together, Geary e-mailed his lecture slides to his students before each class.

"Internet readings were a welcome change to buying an expensive textbook," said one student. "In addition, the Internet readings were current, sometimes updated daily."

Another student said that textbooks which use "current examples" to help explain concepts are years behind. It takes that long to get a book written, posted, and distributed.

Students also liked the diversity of views they found on the Internet, instead of the one view of one textbook.

According to Geary, students in the Internet class were assigned to read the equivalent of 500 printed pages. Some students wanted to learn more, so they ended up reading much more on the Internet than was required of them. One student joked, "I kept getting lost in all the links." Students read another 200 pages from books and journals to complete their projects.

The upshot was, students in the University evaluation rated the Internet class at 91 percent over 58 percent for the textbook class.

The Internet approach, however, is very labor intensive for the teacher.

"But it's more than worth it," said Geary. "Students want to learn things that happen now. Then they can talk with confidence with others and impress them with what they've learned. All of this motivates them and reinforces their learning."

Full-time teachers can also learn a lot by using an Internet approach, added Geary. "It helps them learn more about the 'real world' and it's easier than most of them think."

Mark Gross Comments:

Commenting on the PR students' story, Data Conversion Laboratory President Mark Gross last night made the following key points:

"People (especially students) are adapting to new technologies much quicker than many assumed. Even newspapers (as in "obviously no one will read a computer online"), can't be taken for granted anymore -- I personally read a lot of my news on Palm Pilot or online."

• "Today's technology allows people a choice, and people expect a choice. So traditional providers of learning materials (publishers) who take their customers for granted are at risk -- it's expected that materials be current and in convenient format."

• "There's a major opportunity here. Publishers are naturals to take on these new [online] markets since they own the materials and are already editing the collections of resources. But instead, at least in this case, they're losing the market by default."

• "The websites that publishers build alongside their books should be seen as opportunities, not as 'necessary evils.' (They could encourage their authors to post their current thinking and commentaries, for example, which would draw a lot of traffic)."

• "I'd guess that PR tutor David Geary would have preferred to have used a published website (and provided income to that publisher) rather than spend so much time and effort scouring the web. He wants to teach, not assemble and edit materials. As it was, all that was available was a 10-year-old book that just wasn't suitable. Geary considered it a rip-off, took on the challenge, and went and did his own thing."

DCLnews Editorial
2/13/2003

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