Good Questions

Questions that have arisen:

• If you wouldn’t call it a lab, what would you call it?
• How would you design the experience so that the lab model, etc becomes self sustaining/defining
• What has to happen to reach a tipping point for the students to ‘get’ this model? Staff?
• What does a 21st century honours mean, or require?
• What do you think the pitch for this is?

Teaching and Learning (1)

First crack at the teaching and learning experience for honours.

Honours encourages you to approach communications research as a disruptive, informed and transformational practice. The laboratory, from the point of view of your disciplinary experience and learning, will be seriously playful, liminal and enabling.

Meeting Notes October 20

Present: Rachel Wilson, Adrian Miles, Jeremy Parker, Cathy Greenfield, Karen Trist.

Presented the program proposal as it has gone to college and Building One. The major differences to what has been discussed and modelled to date:

1. will share research methods with existing subjects, but we have enough students to run our own tutorial cohort, so 2 hour workshop, not 3
2. labs must have 15 students
3. scaled down numbers for beginning, so 30 COG and 5 ION places
4. individual supervision for semester two only

If the program grows, then a final total enrolment of 45 has received support from within the School, which would also mean three labs. In terms of delivery cost, the program is predicted to lose the School around $140,000 per year. (Back of spreadsheet calculations with the financial analyst indicated B.Comm honours and Creative Media honours lose a combined $650,000 a year at the moment.)

Discussion then turned to the labs and the implications of only having two. In a nuthsell we recognised that:

• with only two labs having research themes seems problematic, as it is one thing to have four overall themes that reflect the school’s research agenda, but only two means it can’t reflect that
• the labs could still have a theme but these could more easily change from year to year
• first semester labs could be about the theme, about that topic domain and learning about it (as you need this to be able to frame a viable research proposition around it)
• while second semester labs could be reconsidered in terms of practice – how and what students are making, where there might be one lab dedicated to the sorts of research practices that revolve around writing, or theses, and a second one dedicated to project and exegesis work
• this reflects the 24 credit point that is now allocated to labs in semester 2 (done to enable a part time enrolment structure)

Problems arise though if enrolments increase and we have three labs, but of course the simple dichotomy between two types of labs might change with more students as well. This requires a lot of discussion and thinking about, as it does need to be nailed down shortly.

Presentation to 2010 B.Comm Honours

The Honours Studio

In the last class for the current Bachelor of Communication (Honours) students this year I made a presentation about the new honours proposal. They had a lot of good feedback and ideas, most of which I’ll document separately once I go through the notes they made for me.

Second presentation about the new honours (pdf)

Official

The first Expression of Interest for the new Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours) has been endorsed. This means this blog can now be visible to the world, and we are allowed to tell everyone that, yes indeed, we are cooking up and hatching out a media lab style honours program.

Costing Scenarios

Honours loses money. Apparently no way it can’t since a) it is premised on individual supervision (aka expensive) just like postgraduate research, yet b) is funded at an undergraduate rate. So the juggling act becomes how to structure, deliver, make happen what is really important to honours without going too far into the red. No one really can tell you how much too much is, so it is a funny sort of dance since you don’t really know the steps.

However, the heart of honours is the laboratory and our methods subject. So to cost different models these are the sorts of things that will be run through the financial analyst’s spreadsheet; what happens if we:

• remove the communication subject?
• reduce the labs from 4 to 3 but retain the same enrolment numbers?
• increase our international enrolment by n?
• change the supervision model so that it is group supervision?
• what happens if supervision is ‘rolled’ into the lab?
• only having supervision for one semester?
• how much would it cost if no labs?

Also, if we called labs a studio or similar does that make a difference to how the university thinks about its costing?

Ideally several scenarios should be able to be sent ‘up’ for discussion and consideration, however I think the decision making systems in place might not cope with treating this as an informed conversation and would prefer a single model that they can say yay or nay to (after all they do know the steps to this dance so the working group choreographing several dances just, well), in which case we may have to pick and plump for our preferred option and leave it at that.

Meeting Notes, October 5

The things we need to briefly discuss:

• meeting Thursday with financial analyst to work through a variety of scenarios for costing the honours program
• next steps for the LTIF proposal
• Expression of Interest has been endorsed, we are now official
• next best steps for this working group in relation to making honours a success?
• seminar come symposium come discussion on October 22nd with Cameron Tonkinwise and Anne Burdick – what, why, how?

Francesca, Jeremy P, Jeremy Y, Yoko, Karli, and Adrian attended. Long discussion about implications of various funding scenarios and any further scenarios that could be costed. These have been added to the relevant post.

We discussed the RMIT Learning and Teaching Investment Fund application and given the complete application is required to be submitted by October 17 agreed that we did not have time to do this, and that we would continue with it with the view for making it a part of the 2012 honours delivery.

We agreed to continue with developing and writing out the learning and teaching and research vision for the honours program, and that this also be provided to Cameron and Anne so that they could a) help us write these statements and b) critique the laboratory model we have developed and c) develop and contribute to a laboratory scenario for us.

Next meeting, Wed October 20, 1pm.