After studying for 16-and-a-half years, I have finally got it.
The piece of paper that marks the end of the Singapore education journey: the degree.
My last semester ran from August to November 2020 and was held completely online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Keep that fact in mind as you read these module reviews.
NM4223: New Media and Organisations
MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors
Delivery:
Weekly 3-hour seminar
Assessment:
Individual thought leadership assignment, where you will write three articles on LinkedIn about empirical research related to the module and a reflection essay based on your experience doing this assignment = 30%
Group webinar presentation, where your group will deliver a webinar on a topic related to the module with interactive elements to engage the audience = 30%
Open-book midterm test on LumiNUS, consisting of four open-ended questions = 20%
Participation = 20%
Lecturer: Dr Suwichit (Sean) Chaidaroon - 11/10
By far the most student-centric, kind, and encouraging lecturer I had this semester, Dr Sean has a very nurturing character that makes him an excellent educator. He was always generous with his words of affirmation towards students' work, and gentle with his criticisms. I was also mightily impressed with the thought process behind how he designed the assessments for the module. He explained that he wanted the assessments to have practical value to us as we started on our career journey. For example, the individual thought leadership assignment was intended to boost our profile on LinkedIn, the platform which professionals like us use to network and improve their career prospects. The group webinar presentation was intended to give us hands-on experience in delivering webinars in the role of subject-matter experts, which we might eventually do as part of our jobs in the communications industry. Furthermore, he also wanted to give students with various strengths the chance to showcase their skills: the individual thought leadership assignment was where those who are good at writing could excel, while the group webinar presentation was where those who are good at speaking could shine. I felt this showed that Dr Sean really cares about designing his module in a way that all students would benefit from it, which earns him bonus marks and hence this high score.
Module: 9/10
The content of the module is very relevant to real life, which is always appreciated. Essentially, it deals with a wide range of issues regarding the use of technology in the corporate world. For example, it examines how technology can be used for nefarious deeds such as cyberbullying among employees, the pros and cons of telework, and even dealing with workplace romances. One area that could be improved is tying the weekly themes together into a coherent narrative. Currently, it seems like the topics that are discussed week-by-week are rather disparate and do not really fit into a sort of big picture framework. If they could be organised in such a fashion, it would be ideal. But this is just a suggestion and by no means a deal-breaker. I highly recommend this module to anyone who will eventually work in a corporate environment, which is basically all of us.
NM4228: Crisis Communication
MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors
Delivery:
Weekly 3-hour seminar
Assessment:
Concept assignments, which are relatively short tasks, with two done individually and one done as a group = 40%
Group project, which involves constructing a full crisis communication plan = 30%
Participation = 30%
Lecturer: Ms Bhavani Krishnasamy - 7/10
Ms Bhavani was teaching for the first time, so naturally it did not go as smoothly as it would have with a more experienced lecturer. She would sometimes change her mind about assignments and seemed to be making them up as she went along, and even wanted to allow up to ten students to do the group project together before eventually settling on a maximum of six. I also felt that she missed out on capitalising upon one of the key strengths of a practitioner-educator (as opposed to the usual academic researchers who teach most university modules), which is using their industry experience to illustrate their lessons and bring them to life through anecdotes. Perhaps she thought that university modules are supposed to conform to the standard "do your readings and discuss them" formula, but this is not the case, as other practitioner-educators like Mr Lim Wei Yi, Dr Tan Ee Lyn, and Mr Adrian Heng (more on him below) have shown.
Module: 7/10
The module turned out to be so much more theoretical than I expected. I had heard that it was a very industry-oriented, real-world module under the previous lecturer Mr Adrian Heng, which I had believed because I had taken another one of his modules and found that this was indeed the case. Unfortunately, he is no longer with the department. The reworked version of the module is now full of conceptual stuff but lacking in the nitty-gritty of how to go about communicating during a crisis. For example, I remember that Mr Heng dedicated a lecture during his other module that I took, which was actually about social media management, to crisis communications and he gave us very detailed information such as who should comprise the crisis communications team and the roles that each person should play, how to set up a media centre (and a pro tip: it should be as far away from the holding room for family and friends of victims as possible, because it is a bad idea to let the press take lots of photographs of grieving people or interview them as they will be emotionally unstable and may say some very damaging things against your company), and how to organise a press conference. I would have liked more of these practical pointers in this module instead of just more theories. I get more than my fill of those from other modules already.
NM4230: Communication for Social Change
MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors
Delivery:
Weekly 3-hour seminar
Assessment:
Individual paper, in which you reflect on your learning points from the module = 20%
Group project, in which your group will come up with a solution to a social issue = 55%: 20% strategic report, 15% tactic report, 10% presentation, 10% peer review
Leading group discussions, in which your group will deliver a presentation on the lecture topic for the week and start a discussion with the rest of the class = 10%
Participation and attendance = 15%
Lecturer: Dr Asha Rathina Pandi - 8/10
Dr Pandi is... well, enthusiastic to a fault. She shouts shrilly and excitedly into the microphone every single lesson. Her passion for the subject is never in question. But sometimes this passion causes her to ramble too much about one topic or veer off on a tangent, which is not an ideal thing to do in any lesson but especially a fully online one where attention is a precious commodity. To her credit though, her interactions with students were always nurturing and jovial, never toxic or negative. And she followed up regularly on the progress of the group projects to keep everyone on track, an effort which is much appreciated.
Module: 7/10
Too much "what" and not enough "how". That is the way I would describe the weakness of this module. I took away a lot of broad concepts like "participatory approach" and fancy terms like "epistemological", but I thought that at times, these simply served to overcomplicate matters. For example, "participatory approach" is actually a simple idea: when we want to help a certain group of people, we should consult them and work with them when coming up with interventions, rather than imposing on them a solution that we think is best. The module has a lot of big notions like this, but is fairly light on specific details. How do we go about working with target populations to design effective solutions to help meet their needs? In other words, the module suffers from the problem of leaving more questions than it answers. Which is fine if you like this sort of philosophical and reflective style, I suppose, but it is not something I personally enjoy.
NM4240 : Risk Perception and Communication
MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors
Delivery:
Weekly 3-hour seminar
Assessment:
2 x individual paper, the first evaluating a health risk from a scientific perspective and the second evaluating how the risk is portrayed in the media = 2 x 20% = 40%
Individual leading discussion, in which you are assigned a research paper to read and evaluate for its strengths and weaknesses = 10%
Group project, in which your group will analyse existing risk communication efforts around a topic of your choice and propose your own to address any shortcomings you identified = 30%
Participation and attendance = 20%
Lecturer: Dr Hong Soo Jung - 9/10
Dr Hong is very patient and encouraging, rarely having negative things to say to students. I like this because sometimes I feel like educators make use of their positions of power over students to bully students and make their lives difficult for no other reason than sadistic pleasure, so I always look favourably on educators who treat their students nicely instead. Dr Hong also does a fairly decent job of breaking down a dry, theoretical subject into nuggets that students are better able to process. But I did feel that at times, she would get carried away expounding at great length about some topic or other, and I would get lost and subsequently tune out. Keeping her lecture delivery concise and to-the-point would help greatly in this regard.
Module: 8/10
To be honest, this module is rather heavy-going as it is packed with plenty of models and theories, all attempting to explain how people view the concept of risk. If, like me, theories are not quite your cup of tea, you will struggle to keep your attention focused during lectures. But I gave this module more marks because the assessments are well-designed. The individual papers are scaffolded nicely, with plenty of guiding questions given to help you come up with content to write. The second paper also builds upon the first so you do not have to start it from scratch. Similarly, the group project consists of the abstract stage, the literature review stage, and the final report stage, with submissions required at each stage. This allows the lecturer to keep tabs on your progress and provide feedback to ensure you are on the right track. All this means that even if you have a hard time following the finer details of the lessons, you will probably still be able to survive the assessments.
This is the last set of module reviews I will ever write! I never thought I would be saying that so soon but the years have just whizzed by so fast. I started doing these reviews when I started university in 2017 because I noticed it was a common practice among Singaporean university students who had blogs so I simply carried on the tradition. But I know that over the years, my reviews have helped many of my juniors because some have sent me messages to thank me for writing them. This was very encouraging so I was motivated to continue pushing these out after every semester.
Now my job is done and it is time for the next generation to take over. So if you are a junior and you are reading this, do write your own module reviews for future batches of students to benefit from!
And if you have been reading and enjoying my academics-related blog content through the years, thank you for your support! Such content was a major focus of this blog and now that I am no longer a student, I am not sure what the future of this blog is going to be. I will still post here every now and then, but it will probably have a slightly greater emphasis on my favourite computer game, RuneScape. But there will also be posts on rather whimsical and disparate topics, depending on what catches my fancy at a particular time. So I hope you will continue to find things you enjoy here!
