This is a guest blog post by Jessica Gasiorek, grant recipient and project lead developing OER for the COMG 371 undergraduate course at UHM.
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For most of us, communicating is like breathing. We do it frequently and easily (with occasional exceptions), without worrying about how it works. Despite feeling simple, however, communication is actually a quite complex—and in some ways, amazing—phenomenon: using a combination of sounds and body movements, we are able to change another person’s thoughts, and to take a wide range of otherwise invisible things going on in our own minds, and share those things with others.
COMG 371: Message Processing is a course designed to help students better understand the fundamentals of human communication. The course addresses two related questions: How does human communication work? And, what happens— biologically, cognitively, and socially—when we communicate? COMG 371 is a required course for both majors and minors in Communicology, and the topics covered in it are often challenging for students. In this course, students are asked to objectively and scientifically examine behaviors and experiences in their everyday lives (e.g., speaking, listening, making inferences about what others are thinking) that are so routine that they often go unnoticed.
The goal of this OER project is to develop the first sections of a flexible, online, dedicated text for this course. Currently, there is no textbook for the class because there is no single book that addresses all course content, and asking students to purchase several costly academic books (to use only part of each) is not reasonable. However, this means that students currently lack a comprehensive, written resource for this course. This project aims to fill that gap by creating an upper-level undergraduate introduction and explanation of the social and cognitive processes involved in human communication.
Given the project’s relatively short timeline, the text being developed over summer 2017 will focus on content covered in the first unit (i.e., approximately six weeks) of the course. Specifically, this includes:
- Introducing what “message processing” is and why it is important to study;
- Introducing fundamental concepts to communication including interactivity, media, messages, and codes;
- Providing a summary of common definitions of communication (used in contemporary texts in the discipline) and;
- Introducing a “message processing” definition of communication which focuses on communication as a process of creating understanding;
- Introducing the two extant theoretical approaches to modeling human communication, the code model and the inferential model.
This covers foundational concepts and theories required for success in the rest of the course. It also represents the area of course content for which there are the fewest other suitable resources (e.g., other OER content, academic articles or book chapters) available for students. We hope that having dedicated materials for this course should significantly improve students’ experience in COMG 371, and their learning (i.e., comprehension and retention) of course material.
Project Lead
