Co-Curriculum Development and Instructional Strategies for Nurturing Content-Creation Skills for the Creative Industry

Young people need creativity and capabilities to thrive in this fast-changing working environment. An Applied Learning course titled Multimedia Storytelling was launched in 2022 to prepare secondary school students to enter vocational education and training programs in the creative media industry. A curriculum team designed and implemented a series of three skills-training co-curricular activities for the first cohort of students. These activities were organized along the lines of Kolb’s experiential learning model to emphasize mutual reinforcement of concrete experience and abstract conceptualization. Participants practised individual and team-based tasks that were commonly found in a creative media company. This paper uses a case study approach to explore how co-curricular activities and instructional strategies of intensive learning enhanced student learning in creative content creation in different formats, including videos, social media posts, and animated news. The learning objectives, activity design, instructional strategy, and manpower/resource support are described. Teacher observations and post-activity surveys of students are used to assess student learning outcomes. Survey results and observations demonstrate that the instructional strategies assisted students’ learning in personal, cognitive, and social dimensions. Among these, personal development and social benefits were notable. Social benefits were particularly prominent at the one overnight camp. Findings indicated that students improved in their confidence in presenting their creative ideas and engagement in collaborative work. It is recommended that intensive skill-training opportunities be incorporated in the future as part of instructional strategies in vocational education and training. As the co-curricular activities demand high resources commitment, financial support from the government and/or educational institutions is needed.