The IT Faculty Pedagogical Prize enabled new directions for the MSc in Communication
In 2022 Davide Girardelli and Ben Clarke received the IT Faculty Pedagogical prize. Here they describe what the prize and the funding meant for themselves and their programme Master in Communication.
Interview with senior lecturers Davide Girardelli and Ben Clarke
Hello Ben and Davide! What happened after you received the IT Faculty Pedagogical Prize 2022?
“The prize came with a 100.000 SEK grant that opened great opportunities for us in terms of both professional development and as a way to strengthen the pedagogical offering of our programme”, explains Ben Clarke.
“Thanks to the prize, in the summer 2023 I attended a couple of intensive workshops on text mining organized by the University of Utrecht and by the European Consortium for Political Research,” continues Davide Girardelli, programme manager of the Master in Communication. “Text mining techniques, which include sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and word embedding among others, are part of cutting-edge technologies within data science”.
How did you apply the ideas from the workshops into your teaching?
“The workshops inspired a brand-new course in our programme entitled Communication Techniques in the Workplace. In public relations and corporate communication, sentiment analysis is increasingly recognized as a state-of-the-art tool to monitor social media - not only to gain competitive insights but also to analyze broad social issues. With this new course we strengthen the students’ ability to become trend-spotters,” explains Davide.
“With the funds provided by the pedagogical prize we could also offer our students a license to a sentiment analysis tool called Awario. After a couple of lectures dedicated to the underlying technology, students chose a fictional client, picked a relevant social topic, and analyzed thousands of social media conversations. For instance, some students investigated issues such as sustainability in the apparel sector, others looked into car safety from a gendered perspective, and others mapped health-related topics such as diabetes, aspartame, and cancer. The final reports were quite insightful!”, concludes Davide.
What is your overall idea about having this kind of prize and funding?
“We believe that the IT Faculty Pedagogical Prize energized us and motivated us to realize few ideas we have been mulling for quite some time”, Davide and Ben agree. “These extra funds can really make a difference because you can use them freely as long as they provide benefit to our students. We are very grateful with the IT Faculty for their support and encouragement.”