Include examples throughout class
Include examples of the format or medium they’ll be working, as learning content throughout the class. This will help with building media literacy and generating ideas of what quality scholarly creative media can be.
For example, if they’re making podcasts, assign podcasts from your field as homework. If they’re making posters, look at scholarly posters about the studies they’re reading. If they’re making short social-media style videos about research papers, find some TikTok videos from experts in your field. If they’re making infographics, assign infographics to look at throughout the course.
Critically engaging with works in the same medium, and developing skills to do so like close listening and close looking, is an important part of the creative process – not dissimilar from how students who write research articles have to read and analyze research articles in their training.
Scaffold learning and build in milestones
Creative methods and technologies take time to learn and use – especially for a final project. These projects often have many steps to consider.
Providing scaffolding to learn the medium and technologies helps make it less overwhelming and helps cement learning. It's helpful to introduce aspects of media literacy for the chosen format in several sessions – common sessions might include examining other works (e.g. close looking or close listening), project planning/pre-production, production/recording/making or finding content, and post-production/editing.
One way to scaffold a project like this is to break one big project down into several small sections. Another way is to design several smaller explorations individual aspects of the medium and technologies to practice before the big final project.
While less technically intensive projects may not need as much scaffolding, creative multimedia projects in general will benefit from building in milestones throughout the course – just as with many big research papers. When should the project proposal be due by? When should footage or audio be collected by? When is the first draft due? etc. Building in milestones appropriate to the project and medium can help students stay on top of the work as well as better understand from the outset the amount of work that goes in to a project in a medium or format they be less familair with.
Leave time for revising and editing
Editing the project together in particular can be a time-consuming step. And revision and iteration – including recording new material to fill gaps – is often a necessary and beneficial part of the process in creative assessments.
Front-loading more of the work earlier in the semester is a good idea, to give students more time at the end for editing and revision. Starting starting learning the technology and exploring the medium early is very helpful. In many cases, you'll want to get an earlier start on the final project itself than you might with a paper. Explicitly building in time for editing and revision will also help set students up for success.