Alison Arndt-Wild (top center) and her students doing a radio show.
Alison Arndt-Wild’s COMM 2600 students are hungry for knowledge. These are journalism, digital media and video/audio production students who want to work in television or radio, either in front of or behind the cameras and microphones. A few want to work in public relations or the newspaper industry. Many chose Salt Lake Community College for access to state-of-the-art equipment and the best professional learning environment for TV and radio in the state. When access to all of that was suddenly cut off by the pandemic, Alison had to figure out ways to keep the class meaningful and relevant.
“Admittedly, when I first heard we had to move online, I thought there was no way I could move a production class online,” Alison says. “I probably kind of had to go through some stages to make it to acceptance, but when I did it was just about figuring it out. We are a close-knit group in this class, and I knew my students and knew they would be up for this.”
At first, students wanted to keep coming to studio spaces at the Center for Arts and Media on SLCC’s South City Campus, but the rules for social distancing changed all of that. Time for Plan B. Alison is part of a Facebook group called Pandemic Pedagogy, and there was a lot of early “chatter” in the group about using Zoom, a live-streaming online service being used a lot these days. After working with WebEx, Zoom and Facebook Live, she settled on Zoom to collaborate with students and put on a live radio show at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesdays.
“I was worried that they would not be interested, as it is not the same as being in the studio, but I think they are just happy to get to still be doing some form of what they signed up for,” Alison says. “Students are in our program and at SLCC for the hands-on experience that we provide. There was a lot of disappointment when they felt like that was taken away from them. They are still disappointed to not be in the studios, but these students want to be making media, so they are enthusiastic about getting to do it in some form.”
Normally, live shows are streamed through RadioSLCC.com, with its talk and Top 40s music format. The radio studio, however, is off limits. Like a lot of professional media outlets throughout the country, Alison and her students switched to using technology they already had at their fingertips. “We are now more dependent on Slack, Google Drive and our home computers and internet than we were in the past,” she says. “Everyone in the industry is also figuring out how to leverage these technologies right now.”
Students use Slack to communicate and share links to topics for possible discussion. They use Google Drive to share documents. During the show, their conversation seems “off the cuff,” but it’s all researched in advance. Planning, Alison says, is a huge part of radio production. On the day of the show, everyone gets on Zoom to iron out the final details. Students can phone in (having access to audio devices is a minimum requirement now) or use their computers. A few students have their own professional mic setups at home. Right before the show, anyone who is not supposed to be on air leaves Zoom and joins on Facebook if they can. Alison stays on Zoom but turns off her mic and camera to remain behind-the-scenes, able to run the technical side of the show. A student producer uses the chat feature in Zoom to give cues and keep the talent on track. She uses Zoom and Open Broadcaster Software to send the stream to Facebook, and at 10:30 she clicks the “live” button on Facebook as the show starts.
Once the show is done, she takes a recording of it from Zoom and loads it to YouTube. She also makes room in the audio recording for regular show breaks that they would normally have on radio shows. When that’s done, she shares the audio files with Zac Hodge, SLCC student media program manager, via Google Drive – and then he loads them into the radio station’s software so that the whole program plays at 1:30 p.m. later that day on RadioSLCC.com with the song and commercial breaks, just like they would normally do live from the studio on campus.
And that’s live radio (sort of) during a pandemic.
If you want to know what all of that looks and sounds like, click the following links:
And, don’t forget to tune in live at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesdays – only two shows left, April 22 and 29!
“It would mean everything to have the SLCC community tune in,” Alison says. “It would up the stakes and the payoff for the students to know they had more listeners and viewers. Again, that connection to audience is one of the big underlying themes for why they are doing what they are doing and learning what they are learning in this class.”
The first show, when students broke from regular format to talk about feelings, coping and dealing with everything going on, tallied about 150 views on Facebook by mid-April. The second show posted about 500 views. “I was so impressed and happy with the show they created,” Alison says about the second show. “It was entertaining and fun and worked well in all of the distribution channels.” The YouTube views are starting to add up. They’re hoping to see numbers of live viewers go up with remaining shows for April 22 and a final 90-minute show on April 29. Also, be on the lookout for the two final episodes of the student-led Globe News TV show (all made from the homes of students) in early May and final articles for The Globe student newspaper, which always can be found online.
SLCC radio station in normal times