Film and media courses appear well placed to exploit technology convergence in exposing students both to practical skills and to theoretical concepts. For the University of Cape Town's (UCT) large film and media studies courses, it is impractical simply to use the technology of professionals as this would typically be too expensive to purchase and time‐consuming to run. Our approach has been to develop activities that can run with large classes in generic computer laboratories and which simulate environments and tools of the real world. Two illustrative examples, emphasising writing skills in context, involve the production of a TV news story and the development of a proposal for an educational soap opera. Using these, we reflect on our experience of integrating practical skills into the curriculum of a traditional academic institution, where these skills have a lower status and must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate changes in the higher‐status academic components. This suggests that such flexibility has to be part of the design of practical interventions and that they should additionally aim to provide a challenge to some of the more theoretical aspects of these courses. While developing one's own interventions allows for some of this flexibility to be incorporated into the design, it remains difficult for academic departments to adopt these solutions as their own, thus requiring continued involvement of the original developers to adapt to changes.

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   |texte=   Media rich, resource poor: practical work in an impractical environment
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