MDIA3000: Discourse and Promotion

- 50% quizzes: 6 quizzes in weeks 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9 worth 8% each + 2 assessment reflections worth 1% each
- 20% evaluation report summary
- 30% evaluation report presentation

66 units of credit overall including MDIA2005 or MDIA2006 or MDIA2012

This is going to sound like such a Karen comment, but if I could give this course a rating of 0/5, I would. The only reason it gets 1/5 is because my tutor was amazing and really tried to help us out even though we asked so many silly questions that were probably really stupid and a waste of time.

Overall, although I thought the course was awful, I have to acknowledge the care and consideration that was put into structuring the course this term. Lectures were structured into smaller topics on this Moodle function (I have no idea what it's called), so you would watch a short clip going through the lecture content, followed by real promotional examples, which was then followed by a question that somewhat emulated the quiz questions we got every week. I thought this was really well thought out because it's hard to pay attention for long periods of time and it's always good to see real-life examples of what you're learning about; however, the lectures were never uploaded on time. Tutorials were held on Mondays and Thursdays and we had quizzes after our tutorials, and the lectures were never uploaded before Monday. Quizzes were based on the content of the same week (so week 3 content = week 3 quiz) rather than the content of the previous week so it was really frustrating when you got to Wednesday night (my tutorial was on Thursday morning) and the lectures had just been uploaded. I don't even know how the Monday tutorials coped because everyone on Thursday was complaining about the delay in lectures being uploaded.

As for tutorials, they were supposed to run for 2.5 hours, but they were shortened to 50 minutes of content followed by 20 minutes for the quiz. I thought this rendered tutorials practically useless as we had to go through things so quickly and there wasn't enough time to fully explain concepts taught in lectures if we were confused. I think that if the tutorials ran for the full 2.5 hours, the learning experience would've been so much better. Not to mention there wasn't enough time to explain assessments as all tutorial time was used to prepare for the quiz.

Now for assessments. While I understand that the quizzes were worth almost 50% of our grade, there was more explanation of that which was something we did every week than the assignments. We weren't given actual examples of what an evaluation report is in PR which made things really confusing because obviously no student has written a text like that before. We were given a basic structure of how we could write the report, but there was no explanation or clarification in tutorials as to what an evaluation report is and when we asked the tutor, she seemed a bit lost. A lot of the time there was a clear lack of communication between teaching staff because a lot of the time everyone felt like they were left on their own. Assessment result turnover was also really awful as we required the results from A2 to do the final assignment and we didn't get that back until a week before the final assignment was due, and even then, feedback was not helpful whatsoever. Even though we got these a week back before the final assignment was due, this was after the final due date was pushed back a week after lobbying from students.
To cap it all off, the course content didn't feel very relevant to the PR or advertising industries, and we struggled to make it relevant to what we would want in the future. I really hope that the course convenor will take our feedback on MyExperience into account because this course was a mess.

3 - 2 hour lecture, 1 hour tutorial

2/5

Yes because of online learning, although I think lectures for the course are in the same format outside of the pandemic.

Lecturer - Luk Swiatek, Tutor - Katya Quigley

Everything you need is on Moodle.

1/5

N/A

2020, T2