MDIA3008: Issues and Crisis Communication

- 25% group presentation
- 25% short essay
- 50% critical analysis or crisis communications plan

66 units of credit overall including MDIA2005 or MDIA2006 or MDIA2012

This course transitioned really well to online learning. I didn't find it particularly enjoyable because the content was a little dry and repetitive at times, but there was clear foresight into how skills and concepts learnt in class could be applicable to a career in the communications industry.

Lectures were posted in the PPT format with voice recordings which I thought wasn't ideal, but it was definitely convenient if you wanted to go through content again or if you missed something. I didn't like this format because I couldn't speed up the lecture and conversion to an MP4 file to fast track it didn't work because audio became out of sync. As for tutorials, the majority of tutorials were taken up by the group presentations which were based on that week's content, and the presentations analysed a case study chosen by students with theory. The remainder of tutorials mostly repeated main points from the lecture which could be boring.
As for assessments, I thought they were alright, and relevant to course material and for building on skills required in the PR industry except maybe the essay, but that helps indirectly as it builds on critical thinking skills. I thought that the presentation was really good in getting people to work together, but that could probably be because I was really lucky to get a good group and we worked well together. The only concern I have with the final assessment was that we had the option to choose between a critical analysis or crisis communications plan. The critical analysis is an individual task, but it is essentially the same thing as the group presentation but more concise and can cover a larger range of topics, as you can pick from every topic in the term compared to the week you were assigned to for the presentation. The crisis communications plan was a group task (2 people) and I think that doing the plan would've been better as it actually puts concepts learnt throughout the course into practice rather than writing what was essentially a semi-structured essay.

4 - 2 hour lecture, 2 hour tutorial

2/5

Yes because of online learning, but the convenor/lecturer did tell us that there were recordings if lectures were live.

Lecturer and tutor - Peter Roberts

Everything you need is on Moodle.

3/5

N/A

2020, T2