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156 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education If students need help, they will find answers to their questions in the collection of tutorials and resources provided by the interface. The thematic classification of the posts, the so-called Assignments Bank, contains the posts of the (former) participants; it is the participants responsibility to publish two new posts in this category by the end of the course. The course announced by the university covers one semester. The participants never meet the lead instructor(s) offline during the course, but the communication between fellow students and the teacher(s) takes place through various online channels. Ifthere is a risk of a participant dropping out, the instructors will contact the student at the halfway point. In addition, every Tuesday, at 5:00 pm the students can participate in a so-called internet show where they can discuss their problems and reflect on each other's creations. In the fall semester of the 2015/2016 academic year, Paul Bond and Jim Groom launched a thematic ds106 course that explored the specifics of the horror genre through DST. The instructors regularly posted weekly assignments on the common website in video form, delivering instructions to the students through an engaging style of dialogue. For shorter weekly products, students must regularly include a professional reflection on their own blog. During the course, students read and recommended horror stories as well as literature on the genre and created scary stories with horror characters. As students also learned about the film language of the horror genre, they continuously analyzed the formal characteristics of the films they watched and took part in photography exercises.* Students were also tasked with creating an audio play that featured scary sound effects using Audacity, SoundCloud and Freesound. The film editing module also included two subtasks: students had to remix and mashup a film. To complete the course, students were also asked to produce longer narratives in a variety of formats, with mandatory assignments including a podcast, two video tutorials, and a digital story in the horror genre. Students had three weeks to create the final video product, an extravaganza. The whole process was based on the active participation and creativity of the students, who had mastered the storytelling conventions of horror. By the end of the course, they had learned to edit images, audio, and video. An additional benefit of the course was that constructive participatory behaviors on social interfaces as well as an active, meaningful, and cooperative online presence became automated for students. Horror as a topic and DST as a methodological framework provided a valuable opportunity to learn a variety of narrative strategies and develop a culture of responsible, critical, and active online behavior.” 5% Photographic assignments collected by John Johnston under the name photoblitzer: http://johnjohnston. info/photoblitzer/ 7 https://ds1o6.us/history/
