First year communication and physiology classes collaboate for iTunesU content creation. A Practice Report

Abstract

This practice report addresses the student experience of a communication-based learning task completed as both a cross-disciplinary and cross-campus collaboration. The project aimed to equip future health science professionals to use 'new' media to communicate physiological science to non-professional audiences, and future communication professionals to interpret a technically complex brief, and render it accurately for non-scientific audiences. This approach seeks to embed an understanding of the significance of communicating science in the professional socialisation of both health science and communication graduates; and to begin that embedding process from the first year of higher education. We found that while physiology students were challenged by having to render science in terms understood by lay people; and the communication students experienced difficulty in comprehending the science, and in rendering that science in visual language, both cohorts reported the experience enhanced their respective communication capacities, and they valued the intra-cohort collaboration.