COMS101-25S1 (D) Semester One 2025 (Distance)

Media and Society

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 17 February 2025
End Date: Sunday, 22 June 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 2 March 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 11 May 2025

Description

COMS101 explores the relationship between society and media - including social media, print, broadcasting, and all kinds of online spaces. It asks how our understandings of the world and people around us are mediated, how media have shaped society, and how society is reflected and produced through media. We will explore topics like media audiences, technologies, ownership and work; the frames of representation, power, and identity; and analytical tools like semiotics, discourse, and narrative. COMS101 is a stage one course that does not require any prior media study, but it builds on everything you have ever watched, listened to, interacted with, and produced. This course has on-campus and distance options. It includes weekly written exercises and requires active in-class engagement on campus, or in the distance stream to develop core university skills and learn effectively from the teaching staff and from each other.

Learning Outcomes

  • Knowledge: you should be able to:
    Understand the value of media literacy
    Understand the broad media environment of Aotearoa New Zealand
    Recognise the role of media in producing and circulating ideas about society, identity, and culture
    Identify processes in the construction of media texts

  • Skills: you should be able to:
    Research media issues using books, journals, and online sources
    Analyse a media text using a range of tools
    Write a well-structured academic essay confidently and with clarity
    Communicate using different media forms
    Discuss the ideas, processes, and technologies shaping the media
    Interpret media content in terms of production processes, audiences, and technologies

  • Attributes: you should feel more confident about:
    Researching and writing an academic essay
    Expressing yourself verbally, visually, and in writing
    Reflecting on your own experience as a media audience member and producer
    Talking with your peers and lecturers
    Your own abilities and aptitudes in university study
    What you need more help with, and where to find it.

Course Coordinator

Zita Joyce

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage  Description
Library exercise 5% This exercise will test your knowledge of accessing and retrieving information through online library resources.
Tutorial Engagement 10% Completing activities in tutorials in class or online, Distance students: we will have a range of ways to engage with tutorials.
Tutorial Worksheets 5% In tutorials weeks 3 & 9
Short essays x 3 20% 1000 words due 21 March 2025, 500 words due 2 May 2025, Short essay 3 due in Tutorial week 11.
Creative Project 30% Week 7

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $894.00

International fee $4,100.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Language, Social and Political Sciences .

All COMS101 Occurrences

  • COMS101-25S1 (C) Semester One 2025
  • COMS101-25S1 (D) Semester One 2025 (Distance)
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