We have to imagine what the world will look like in the next ten years, so we can prepare our current college students for the workforce in 2035. Since the pandemic, a lot of our lives have transformed to working, communicating, and collaborating online. So, some of these college preparations will involve more online dynamics: clubs, organizations, and internships.
Based on Visions of the Internet in 2035, “building better spaces will involve digital platforms that codify new norms to facilitate open and honest communication. Along with collecting, organizing, publishing, and archiving useful, reality-based knowledge”.
Jackie Otero has worked in online education for the past 10 years and has recently transitioned her role with the school in career development and the alumni for the Los Angeles Film School. Otero was the founder of the online clubs for the school back in 2021. Her inspiration is students, and especially those students who are online. She recognized online students needed a sense of community.
Otero states: “Let me just collect all the little pieces of community and clubs that are happening throughout the whole school and centralize them in one place. And that sort of coincided with one of our program directors wanting to do a community. Then, I decided, let me build a directory of online clubs so that everybody knows what they are and what they can join. And then we’ll launch this discord community where we can have a channel for every club.”
So, the school utilizes the online platform, Discord, which has voice and video chat functions; bots and integrations; roles and permissions; text chat and direct messaging; and servers and channels. Sounds like a dystopian novel or film where robots are taking over the world perhaps.
Animation student, Sarah Wadley from the Los Angeles Film School is in her last year at the college and has been the online club leader for Dungeons and Dragons as well as Fitness and Wellness for over a year.
Wadley shared some strategies on the Discord platform for recruiting new and fellow members.
Wadley is creating multiple threads in her Fitness/Wellness channel (Lounge), so she can provide multiple chat forums (self-care, gym chatter, and yoga-free), so members can be personal and professional in different spectrums of health, diet, and mental awareness.
She demonstrates the Discord features, so members have quick access to these spaces because the areas are tagged.
Wadley states: “One of the problems we’ve had in D&D before is, people will start a game, and they’ll just drop out. And then we have a hard time getting more people interested in that game”. In her D&D channel, she creates different digital forms, so there is some accountability for members to create characters ahead of time, add disclaimers for storylines, and secure placement at the tables for a game.
Larisa Figueroa is one of the music production students at the Los Angeles Film School. She currently holds a position as a club liaison– an online internship through the school. In this role, she supports students who lead online clubs and continues to build more connections and relationships.
Figueroa shared some of her music and discussed her professionalism in her career, schoolwork, craft, and internship. Her wisdom in balancing everything and still making time for the creative process.
Finally, Otero leaves us with some thoughts leading our online clubs onward to 2035..
“We have to give students a process. We have to get them started because it’s really hard for them to build community online by themselves. So I think you need to give them a platform. You need to direct them to a place where they can make those connections”.
Interviews with Jackie Otero; Larisa Figueroa; and Sarah Wadley from the Los Angeles Film School.
Insecure by Larisa Figueroa
Stacy Feuerherdt 