UDMECOFY - BSc Media and Communications (including foundation year)

The BSc Media and Communications (with foundation year) addresses how the media shape both the way we live and the world around us. The media are central to the experience of modern life. Television, radio, print media, cinema, and digital media all operate as channels for communicating information, education, politics, art and entertainment. They can build and connect local, national and international communities. They can shape our views of the world, our values, identities and our fantasies.

The BSc Media and Communications (with foundation year) engages with all these aspects of contemporary cultural life. Key issues in this field of study are: how the various media are produced; the development of the media and their contemporary transformations; the relationship between the media and questions of gender, race, sexuality and identity; how the media are used and understood by particular audiences; how the media are regulated and the role of transnational organisations; and how the media now integrate with wider industry through marketing, advertising, and public relations. The course approaches these questions from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, social, historical, textual, political, economic, creative and practical.

Throughout the BSc Media and Communications (with foundation year) programme students will develop informed and critical understandings of the difference made by mass media and communications technologies to the social, political, and economic worlds we inhabit, as well as the ways in which they shape our symbolic world: the world of perceptions, meanings and values. In addition students will develop factual understandings of the institutions and operations of the media and communications industries, their modes of representation and their place within a wider ‘Circuit of Culture’. Knowledge and a comparative understanding of media in a range of historical and contemporary contexts, and in a variety of national and global environments will also be acquired. Students will also become familiar with a range of interdisciplinary approaches to media institutions, media texts and media audiences, and will engage critically with major thinkers, debates and intellectual theories within the field.

The course is taught using a combination of traditional, and innovative teaching methods, fostering problem-based and inquiry-based learning, and reflective engagement. Active learning is supported by a combination of lectures, workshops, seminars, tutorials, online resources, work placement and field trips. Development of employability and professional practice is both integrated across the curriculum and addressed in specific modules. Students are encouraged to reflect on their learning process, preparing for knowledge creation, life-long learning and leadership. Assessments are designed to enable students to personalize their learning while developing key academic skills, including academic writing, presenting, and elements of creative practice.

A blended learning strategy is employed to enhance the learning experience, facilitate communication between students and tutors and develop collaboration among students. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) will be used as a platform to support online activities, facilitate formative assessment and related feedback, as well as a tool to integrate useful online learning materials provided by research institutions, academic publications, professional organisations and other relevant sources. Students will have access to specialist media resources including production facilities and media equipment, and will be expected to utilize these learning resources in their academic success. The curriculum has been designed to allow students to engage with contemporary debates and current affairs, and to reflect the changing media landscape and employment market.

Students will be able to develop practical skills in a range media and media-related activities, including photography, film, television, social media production, radio production, audio and video editing, and web design. Students will develop transferable skills of value in a variety of academic and employment contexts, with various modules helping to develop a range of critical abilities, a creative and imaginative approach to problem solving, and skills of analysis and presentation.

Course Aims

The aims of the BSc Media and Communications are to:

• Support student in their transition to undergraduate study by providing a foundation year focused on developing key academic skills and competencies that are designed to facilitate success at subsequent levels.

• Establish a sound theoretical and methodological framework for the coherent and systematic exploration of the languages and forms of the mass media and the relationship between production, distribution, reception, and the construction of meaning in the media by introducing students to a range of theoretical perspectives and debates and encouraging students to apply these in analysis of contemporary media practice.

• Develop a knowledge and understanding of the media and culture in their historical contexts through the examination of an appropriate range of materials and practices in both their contemporary and historical forms.

• Explore the cultural and ideological debates underlying the development of the academic frameworks of media and communications studies, with particular reference to mass media’s negotiations of power, gender, sexuality, race, and class in reflection of the University’s mission and social justice strategy.

• Develop in students a confident understanding of their particular interests and abilities and the ways in which these might be directed in relation to contemporary media and cultural concerns and aspirations .

• Introduce students to a range of approaches that will enable them to analyse the structures and processes whereby media and popular culture texts and practices are produced and consumed.

• Facilitate an understanding of various global and international contexts increasingly influenced by media, communications and cultural industries and enable students to explore and analyse national and international power relations in media and communications.

• Expand the intellectual and imaginative capacities of students, through the development of an understanding of the changing nature of communications and culture in society, by emphasising their responsibilities for reflecting on and questioning the diverse ideas, values and practices which underlie these changes.

• Provide students with an integrated and thorough understanding of the ways in which social practices and cultural processes inform our consciousness of our affiliations and ourselves.

• Introduce students to a range of theoretical approaches focusing on the interconnections between various forms of public and media culture and the structures of individual, everyday lived experience.

• Consider the critical importance of the mass media as a significant area of contemporary culture.

• Widen access to higher education and to create an enabling environment for non-standard and standard students, thereby promoting equality of opportunity for UK, EU and international students.

• Provide opportunities for students to acquire a range of transferable skills that will enable them to engage critically and creatively in contemporary media and popular cultures.

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

ULO: Demonstrate confidence, resilience, ambition and creativity and will act as inclusive, collaborative and socially responsible practitioners/professionals in their discipline.

LO1: Demonstration competency in key academic skills and competencies through completion of a foundation year of study.

LO2: Demonstrate coherent knowledge of communication, media, film and cultural forms and processes and understanding of a range of concepts, theories and approaches appropriate to the study of those forms and processes with particular reference to mass media’s negotiations of power, gender, sexuality, race, and class;

LO3: Demonstrate the capacity to apply this knowledge in critical analysis, research, and media production undertaken as a part of their programme of study;

LO4: Demonstrate knowledge of the central role that communications, media, film and cultural agencies play at local, national, international and global levels of economic, political and social organisation, and the ability to explore and articulate the implications of this;

LO5: Show understanding of production processes and professional practices within media, cultural and communicative industries, and the ability to engage with and to advance creative processes in one or more forms of media or cultural production;

LO6: Consider critical, ethical, and analytical views other than their own, and exercise independent and informed critical judgement in analysis of media and cultural forms and practices;

LO7: Accurately deploy established techniques of analysis and enquiry within Media and Communications;

LO8: Devise and sustain arguments, and/or to solve problems, using ideas and techniques, some of which are at the forefront of Media and Communications;

LO9: Describe and comment upon particular aspects of current research, or equivalent advanced scholarship, recognising the uncertainty, ambiguity and limits of knowledge;

L10: Manage their own learning, and to make use of scholarly reviews and primary sources (for example, refereed research articles and/or original materials appropriate to media and Communications;

LO11: Apply the methods and techniques that they have learned to review, consolidate, extend and apply their knowledge and understanding, and to initiate and carry out projects;
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LO12: Critically evaluate arguments, assumptions, abstract concepts and data (that may be incomplete), to make judgements, and to frame appropriate questions to achieve a solution - or identify a range of solutions - to a problem;

LO13: Communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences;

LO14: Exercise initiative and personal responsibility, including decision-making in complex and unpredictable contexts;

Subject Benchmark Statement for Communication, Media, Film and Cultural Studies, Apr2024:

https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/sbs/sbs-communication-media-film-and-cultural-studies-24.pdf?sfvrsn=c401b481_4

The course combines practice-based and theory-based learning, and through the curriculum aims both to critically analyse the media and communication’s sectors and explore how these fit into contemporary industrialised societies. Relationships with other sectors of industry and national and transnational organisations are explored. Core modules require students to engage with both theory and practice in the field and option module choices enable students to extend their expertise in specific areas of media, information and communications. The dissertation module enables students to develop an in-depth understanding of a sector of their choice.

Assessment instruments are tailored to the aims and learning outcomes of each module. Students are expected to produce a mixture of written, visual and oral work and are required to demonstrate working within a team. Students will also produce creative practice-based assessed work as a part of their programme of study, and are required to engage with theoretical frameworks and concepts from a range of discplinary contexts, as appropriate to the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of Media and Communications. Where possible, alternative means of demonstrating achievement of learning outcomes are built into the assessment strategy, but the programme also requires all students to engage with academic writing, report writing, presenting, and creative practice. The programme is entirely assessed by coursework, and this is a pedagogic choice designed to maximise the benefits of assessment for students. Assessments are distributed across the academic calendar in order to minimize clustering of deadlines.

The BSc Media and Communications (with foundation year) uses a standardized assessment marking framework which can be tailored to individual assessment outcomes. Level descriptors are used to define the expectations of assessed work at each level of the programme. Thes are combined with a generic marking scheme which defines what standards of work students need to attain for each grades. The standardized level descriptors and marking scheme is used in combination with specific assessment criteria for each assessment, which set-out the specific and concrete expectations of each piece of work that students submit. This arrangement ensures uniformity of marking and feedback both across modules, and also the consistent progression in expected attainment across the programme.

Students have the option to take a work-related learning module ( Career Development Learning) and engage directly with work-related experience during their period of study. Within the module they have the opportunity to reflect on their experience and skills gained in order to combine both practice-based and critical learning. The module demonstrably contributes towards the student’s portfolio of employable skills, providing the opportunity for students to demonstrate how they have developed high-level transferrable and career management skills, or how their work has demonstrably contributed towards their engagement with the discipline of Media and Communications. In addition students are introduced to employability skills and employment contexts throughout the curriculum, including in the L4 modules Introduction to Digital Practice, the L5 module Media and Communities, and the L6 module Urban Media.

Part time (half time) students would normally proceed through the programme in the following order:

• Year one: Media Context, Pop, pulp and politics; Studio Craft: Filmmaking; Studio Craft: Branding, fashion and Design
• Year two: Intro: Writing for the Media, Making News for TV; Studio craft: Music Video production, Studio craft: InDesign and photoshop
• Year three: Introduction to Digital Practice, Writing and Research, Media Genres; Communication and Image
• Year four: Media Histories, Media and Society, Moving Image Practice, Sound Design for Linear Media
• Year five: Television Studies; Television Studio Practice, Media and Communities; Nation, Migration and the Media
• Year six: Stardom Performance and Celebrity, Visual Culture, Option modules (default: Documentary Photography; Popular Music: History and Culture)
• Year seven: Urban Media, Gender, Bodies and Identity; Media, Power and Politics; Media Audiences
• Year eight: Project modules; option modules (default: Queer Media; Graphical Communications)

Part time students progressing at more or fewer than 60 credits per year would follow the same broad structure. Part time students beginning in February would be encouraged to take sufficient credits to enable them to join the September cohort from the first September after they begin their studies.

All core modules are required to gain the BSc (Hons) Media and communications awards. Awards below this can be gained with any combination of modules on the programme to the requisite credit values; these can be made-up of core or option modules from the programme or suitable alternative option modules agreed by the course leader.

Reflective learning and personal development planning are core dimensions of this course. A variety of learning, teaching and assessment methodologies are deployed in order to assist student in their self-reflected personal development and self-actualisation, and in acquiring the tools to engage in living as a citizen and pursuing economic activity in contemporary societies.

In the course of their study, students are asked to engage with theory and practice in a way that is both grounded in concrete realities as well as dealing with abstract concepts. Reflective learning will vary across modules but will involve at all times engagement with peers and tutors in dealing with both formative and summative feedback on essays and reports; practice based modules all offer the opportunity for reflection on abstract theory and critical analysis of academic literature and policies; theoretical modules present opportunities to engage with abstract theory and test this against concrete examples. Reflective learning is also integral to the practice-based creative work that is integrated into the curriculum.

Students will have the opportunity to develop work related skills and develop their career planning throughout the course in a variety of contexts. Assessments sometimes model work-based practices both within and beyond media and media-related industries, and flexible assessment choices allow students to personalize their learning towards future career aspirations.

PDP is integrated within the curriculum through the Work-Based modules, which encourage students to reflect on their future career aspirations, and the ways of using their learning to achieve those aspirations. Students begin this at L4 in the module Introduction to Digital Practice, which enables students to develop key digital skills with an eye to both academic success and future employability. Media and Communities (L5) encourages students to reflect of the nature of community and their place in it, and at L6 students have the opportunity to undertake a Work Based Learning module, and through the module Urban Media are introduced to situational media work. This L6 project modules provide opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of this element of their learning.

The BSc Media and Communication (with foundation year) is designed to provide general undergraduate education to equip students with skills and competencies expected of graduates in the UK, including writing, presenting, self-actualisation, team-working, analytical and critical skills and elements of creative practice. As such graduates typically enter a very diverse range of employment on graduation, including teaching, charity work, and work in the corporate sector.

Many graduates do go on to work in media and more usually media-related roles. These include content creation, marketing, public relations, social media management, and other similar graduate level occupations in the commercial, public and third sector. In addition students sometimes enter into strategic roles. This range of graduate destinations reflects the diversity of the experience offered by the BSc Media and Communications, which encompasses creative, analytical, social and academic elements, and the flexibility the programme provides for personalizing the educational experience.

Students from the BSc Media and Communications (with foundation year) frequently go on to further study, typically taking Masters level courses in cognate disciplines (Media, Film, Sociology; Social Policy); the strong reputation of the course within the sector means that students often progress onto postgraduate study at high-ranked Universities.

Our creative technologies and digital media graduates have gone on to exciting careers as content programmers, fashion copywriters, motion graphic designers, multimedia journalists and visual effects production assistants, radio presenters, studio runners and producers in companies such as D2 Interactive, TK MAXX, Motion Picture Company, Virtual Arts, Volant Media and We Are Capture.

In addition to the University's standard entry requirements, you should have:

• at least one A level (or a minimum of 32 UCAS points from an equivalent Level 3 qualification, eg BTEC Subsidiary/National/BTEC Extended Diploma)
• English Language GCSE at grade C/grade 4 or above (or equivalent eg Functional Skills at Level 2)

We encourage applications from International/EU students with equivalent qualifications. We also accept mature students with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Suitable applicants living in the UK may be invited to a portfolio interview. Applicants living outside the UK may be required to submit a small portfolio of work via email.