By reviewing many courses based on media literacy, one important issue has been pointed out: the necessity of including media literacy in the curriculum to enable our students to become responsible active citizens in this age of digitalization and daily exposure to social media in multimodal representation. This is why it has been decided to focus on courses that develop media literacy skills and study multimedia literacy concepts. The aim is to raise awareness of the importance of recognizing fake news as well as the dis/mis/information and to be able to analyze and evaluate the multimedia message and multimedia effect.
In the effort to teach our students to acquire multimodal literacy, we will have them both construct and deconstruct multimodal messages. They need to be able to understand that the messages are nowadays being delivered in two or even modes (modes including written and spoken language as well as patterns of meaning that are visual, audio, gestural, tactile, and spatial.). Effectively creating and composing multimodal messages involves skills and understanding that most of us never received at home, at school, or work. Even with the emphasis on multimodal literacy in society today, most kids grow up in environments that stress reading and writing. For the most part, music, photographs, drawings, and other media arts are still treated as extracurricular activities, hobbies, or artistic pursuits. Our students need a wide range of media-related knowledge and competencies to become multimodal literate.
The significance of media literacy as a part of the multimodal representation is rising as the media is becoming more and more manipulative and an expert in creating user-generated media content. Our students, as media consumers, should also develop the skills to understand and analyze the multimodal environment in today’s multimodal and quickly changing mediascape.