At Dartmouth College’s Jones Media Center (JMC), 30-second course promotional trailers are intentionally designed as more than marketing tools. From the beginning, the initiative has served as a creative outreach strategy to encourage faculty to think beyond traditional assignments and explore multimodal teaching, digital storytelling, podcasting, video production, and other media-rich approaches to learning. Created collaboratively by the JMC Digital Media Fellow and media staff, each trailer begins with conversations about course objectives, teaching methods, and meaningful media or visual elements connected to the course, as well as the kinds of experiences faculty hope students will have in their classrooms. The Fellow also works closely with the Dartmouth Libraries Communications Manager throughout the process to better understand branding, audience engagement, visual identity, and effective campus communication strategies. These discussions frequently open pathways to broader collaborations involving media assignments, public-facing scholarship, oral histories, community-engaged storytelling, and other creative projects supported by the media center.The finished trailers are displayed in JMC, across campus on digital signage, departmental websites, faculty pages, and online platforms, increasing visibility for courses while simultaneously showcasing the creative and instructional support available through the library and media center.This presentation will examine the workflow behind the trailers, the role of student media producers in the process, and how short-form media can function as an approachable entry point for deeper faculty engagement with multimodal pedagogy.
