Core units
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Key Concepts & Methods: Users and Producers: This unit explores the key concepts and methods associated with analysing and understanding audiences and producers following a project-based learning approach. It introduces the academic study of media and communication, focusing on concepts and methods used to research users and producers.
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Key Concepts & Methods: Texts and Artefacts: This unit explores the key concepts and methods associated with analysing and understanding texts/artefacts following a project-based learning approach. It provides an introduction to the academic study of media and communication, particularly emphasising the role of media and communication research and its relationship with society and culture.
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Communicating Ideas in the Digital Age: This unit explores the ways in which research, and ideas more generally, can be expressed and communicated via alternatives to the book, the article and the lecture. It examines, for example, the communicative power of video, audio, performance, social media, and games in order to consider how knowledge is mediated in different forms. Students will develop skills as producers, curators and experts as they devise methods and artefacts which translate complex research ideas into forms which are comprehensible by particular audiences.
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Media Diversity & Cross-cultural Communication: This unit aims to support students in developing the knowledge and skills to critically evaluate cross-cultural contexts and to reflect on key themes in the area of media and diversity. The unit will analyse how social and cultural diversity is constructed, represented and understood by the media.
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Major Project: The Major Project is the programme’s capstone unit comprising of a dissertation and exhibition. The dissertation aims to provide students with the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their critical, analytical and research skills by undertaking a significant piece of academic work as the culmination of their programme. The aim of the exhibition is to provide students with the experience of translating their academic work into a media artefact and practice-based presentation, synthesising and furthering their skills in communicating ideas, translating research into media artefacts and targeting audiences.
Option units
Choose one of the following option units each semester:
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Contemporary Perspectives in Media and Communication: This unit focuses on contemporary perspectives in the field, exploring cutting-edge topics, new methods of research, and emergent areas of scholarship. To develop a critical understanding of how academic fields, and associated professional practice develops, the unit examines the role that perspective plays in debates around innovation, industry dynamics, media environments, policies and practices.
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Media & Global Challenges: This unit explores the function and role of the media in the context of shared global challenges, and specifically those defined by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Agenda. It will also examine the role of media and journalism to empower communities to respond to and reduce the risks posed by the challenges defined in the SDGs
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New Media Innovation: In this unit you’ll engage with key issues and debates facing a networked media landscape, where audiences as passive consumers make way for collaborative reporting and crowdsourcing. Ways new media can complement and improve existing journalistic processes will be at the forefront, including data journalism, increased transparency and accountability, mobile news applications and augmented reality. You'll gain an understanding of how to undertake developing online civic media projects for journalistic purposes.
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Brands & Branding: This unit aims to consolidate your understanding of why a brand is a strategic asset for an organisation; how the asset is realised, protected and valued not as a cost but as a source of revenue/ value. You will also be encouraged to critically reflect upon the role and impact of brands and branding in today’s contemporary society and appreciate how branding and brand communications need to evolve in the world of 24/7/always on connected audiences. You will also be exposed to new and emerging forms of brand communication such as branded content, branded entertainment and transmedia storytelling.
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Consumer Insights: Through applied work, you will gain a critical appreciation of the role of theory in generating commercially consumer viable insights and in marketing communications practice. Throughout, the importance of understanding consumer culture and behaviour for the effective development and implementation of marketing communications is explored and analysed.
Please note that option units require minimum numbers in order to run and may only be available on a semester by semester basis. They may also change from year to year.
Programme specification:
Programme specifications provide definitive records of the University's taught degrees in line with Quality Assurance Agency requirements. Every taught course leading to a BU Award has a programme specification which describes its aims, structure, content and learning outcomes, plus the teaching, learning and assessment methods used.
Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the programme specification, the information is liable to change to take advantage of exciting new approaches to teaching and learning as well as developments in industry. If you have been unable to locate the programme specification for the course you are interested in, it will be available as soon as the latest version is ready.
