Subject Code/Name: EDST1104-Social Perspectives in Education Contact Hours: a 2-hour lecture and a 1-hour tutorial each week, 80% attendance is required to pass the course.
Assumed Knowledge: None (A mark of 80+ in HSC English recommended).
Assessment: 600 word Article analysis (20%), 1800 word Research Task (40%), 2000 word Research Report (40%).
All assessments must be passed to pass the course. Lecture Recordings? Yes (but weirdly still needed to attend :/ )
Notes/Materials Available: None - The education Society did hold sessions where they explained how to complete the assignments.
Textbook: Education, Change and Society. This is
NOT needed unless you are aiming for 80+ marks. Tutorials do base some content off the textbook, but nothing googling can't solve.
Lecturer(s): Lecturer: Dr Greg Leaney, Tutor: Sara Mashayekh
Year & Semester of completion: 2018 Semester 1
Difficulty: 1.6/5
Overall Rating: 1.2/5
Your Mark/Grade: 68 CR
Comments: This course was kind of all over the place; it didn't feel like a course that was caring. Their communication skills would vastly improve the overall quality of the course.
The staff almost never answered questions on the courses question forum, out of the 34 different questions asked during the semester, 3 of them got responded to by staff. This was very lazy of them and annoyed the cohort, we felt lost. Although the feedback in assignments wasn't actually that bad, it never gave me a defining explanation on what to improve on for the next task (like 1108 did).
The worst part of it all was the dates in which we
should have received our marks back. The last two assignments were delayed by a week, and we weren't notified about this until 2-3 days after the due date, leaving us confused, it shouldn't be hard to let us know beforehand about the change of dates.
The lectures were fine for the quality of the course, just a man reading off the slides about things that were kind of already known (such as lower SES students struggle more in schooling). The lectures overall were very slow and easy to understand, and conversations about the content were encouraged which was nice.
The tutorial sessions mainly consisted of concepts introduced in the weekly readings or textbook. If you had already done the readings, this hour was spent by explaining to others what the concepts meant, but (on my table at least) just had everyone google them.
The assessments were quite fitting and actually quite enjoyable, and were the defining aspect of the course, they allowed for the insight of schools and the complexity of them, and the theories and strategies a certain school implements. The assessments were not hard to complete, but they were hard to get right, and this is where the tutorials and readings were able to help. Constantly in the feedback, I was told that the way I did an aspect of the assignment was not the way they were looking for, and hence losing marks, but I really enjoyed this.
Overall, if this course were able to better communicate to us, the course would have been much better overall. Was this worth the $800? No. Should it be needed to get a teaching degree? Yeah, I think so, just needs a few tweaks.