Undergraduate - UnitATS2454 - Media audiences

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 1, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Organisational Unit	School of Media, Film and Journalism
Offered	Gippsland First semester 2015 (Off-campus)
Coordinator(s)	Larissa Walker

Synopsis

This unit addresses the key issues of: media audiences and audience activity;the relations between media, citizenship and community; and the impact of new communication technologies. Most importantly, it makes available to you the techniques and theoretical frameworks for researching and analyzing audience activity and interactivity. It also helps you learn how these frameworks can be deployed in research design. The unit is organized in three blocks: ways of being an audience, ways of theorizing audiences, and ways of researching audiences.

Outcomes

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

demonstrate a basic grasp of the social conditions, material practices, products and outcomes of various media
demonstrate an awareness of the connections between communications technologies and the formation of audiences, citizens and communities
utilise the understandings in Objectives 1 and 2 to describe and analyse historical, current and likely future trends in audience formations
identify and evaluate a range of theoretical approaches to understanding audiences
demonstrate basic knowledge of some audience research techniques, issues and choices
utilize the understandings in Objectives 4 and 5 to design a basic research project.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 60%
Exam: 40%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Susan Yell

Prerequisites

Twelve credit points of first-year Arts units.

Prohibitions

ATS3454, COM2423, COM3423, GSC3402, GSC3423