IMPROVING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ RESULTS: A CLIENT-BASED EXPERIMENT THROUGH DESIGN THINKING AND VISUAL STORYTELLING IN COMMUNICATION

Subjects lectured during the 4th year of the Bachelor’s degree in Communication, at the Catholic University of Murcia have a large practical part, which raises their permeability to innovation, especially concerning learning and evaluative methodologies. In this context and throughout the years in which different media subjects were taught, some problems related to the students’ lack of involvement and the low quality of the resulting projects, alongside the limited synergy between the University and the labor market, have been detected. This research follows the hypothesis that working with a real client with whom students interact and develop visual communication projects increases students’ participation, the quality of their projects, and bridges the gap with the labor market. For that purpose, an experiment was conducted during the practical lectures of several visual communication subjects taught during the 2013-2014, 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 academic years, at the Communication Faculty at the Catholic University of Murcia. A sample size of n = 375 with a margin of error of e = 0.05 was calculated according to the total number of students enrolled in communication studies at a national level (N = 17, 213) according to data published by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. Among the main conclusions, we found, after the client-based experiment through design thinking and visual storytelling, a notable improvement of the students’ implication in projects, a rise in formal and content quality of those projects, and an increase in the synergy among the university and the labor market. This successful experiment has provoked its implementation in similar subjects the forthcoming academic years.