Utah Tech University is now offering a class where students have the chance to monetize and potentially get money from posting content.
This is the new film virality lab, called Seminar in Digital Film; a competition style class that gives students the chance to get a feel for how the real world works, especially in the film world.
Assistant professor of digital film, Patrick Smith, said: “When students know they’re competing, they’re more likely to push themselves, think creatively and collaborate effectively. It mirrors the pressures of the real world, where innovation often comes from a desire to stand out.”
The class is divided into seven different sections for the semester:
- Ideation and research: exploring what makes videos viral and creating a list of ideas and key points to have.
- Pitch to executives: students will pitch their ideas to those who hold the funding for the projects. These executives will help hone the student’s ideas, and will then decide how much to fund each channel.
- Production/ post-production: students will dive into pre-production, casting, props, scheduling, etc. This will then lead to creating the content for about four weeks. Then, editing will occur for about three more weeks.
- Develop marketing/ launch plan: plans will focus on the best ways to get content to reach the most people for maximum views and interactions.
- Launch: all content will go out at the same time.
- Viewership and subscriber competition: there will be a month’s worth of work making sure content is analyzed and monitored to see what works and what doesn’t.
- Research review: data will be collected and looked at about the audiences, their viewing patterns, their spending habits, etc., which will then guide where the class goes as far as lectures and next steps.
This class caters to Utah Tech University’s “active learning. active life.” slogan. This real-world experimental class, with the hope of getting monetized, has the potential to launch students into a long term social media and creation career.
The goal of the class is to guide students in a real-world experience with the support of the school. Smith said the class is designed to have the students “fail big.” The projects created by the students will be looked at in the second half of the semester to see what works and what doesn’t work in the social media community.
Elijah Torok, a senior digital film major from Greenwich, Connecticut, said he is most nervous about being on camera for something that could end up being stupid or controversial.
Students will need to get out of their comfort zone for this class and be willing to learn what audiences want. There are a lot of different elements that go into getting the platform monetized as well as keeping the content up to par to stay monetized.
Nate Snow, assistant professor of communication, said, “Each platform requires a certain number of views, followers or a combination of both before content can be monetized.”
A key point to the second block of the class is to learn from each other and grow from each other’s successes and failures.
Torok said: “I’m most excited to dive super deeply into algorithms and analytics to see the methods to push those forward over time. I’m also interested to learn what certain social media platforms are impacted more by certain media elements than others.”
Social media is used for communication and as a way for people to express themselves. It is used to show opinions, personality and to inform others of what’s going on in the world. This class is simply pushing those limits for students to hopefully get them to be successful in the content creating world.
Snow said, “Building a consistent brand voice in social media content is difficult and takes a while, but I think doing it as a class could be so fun and rewarding.”
