For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Julius Pang. I’m sending out this email to previous 3D Animation 391/392 students to urge you to take some action to help improve the quality of the Multimedia Design course.

Why am I emailing all of you?

The Humanities Division representative, Josh Wilcox, and the Guild Education Vice President, Isobel Cassidy, have expressed their concern about the Design school to me after I approached the Student Guild for assistance with an academic appeal. They told me a number of students from Design school have approached them with complaints regarding their courses.

As many of you have probably experienced, the quality of the Multimedia Design course has deteriorated considerably over the last couple of years. I entered the Multimedia Design course in 2001 believing it was high quality…it was at one point, but this is no longer true.

This year has seen perhaps been the biggest change with the introduction of several sessional staff members (i.e. staff members not on campus full-time) to teach our courses. Even more worrying is that some of these staff members happen to be students…Multimedia Studio 392 last semester was being taught by an Honours student.

Some questions all of you should ask yourselves:

- As a 3rd year student, do you really want to be taught any of your units by someone with not much more design education or real world work experience than yourself? (please note, I am attacking the course, not the lecturers)
- As a 3rd year student, do you find yourself learning much in the classroom?

- As a 3rd year student, do you think you are getting a quality education for your money?

If you’ve answered “No” to any of the above questions, then please do what I did, and make your concerns known to the Student Guild Humanities Division Representative, Josh Wilcox. Please forward this email to your fellow classmates and friends in Multimedia Design (or Design in general) who haven’t received this email. I encourage you all to email Josh Wilcox at humanities@guild.curtin.edu.au with your concerns about the course (however minor). As a group, we can help bring about some much needed changes and improvements to our course.

To get you started, here are some of the problems I have found with the course:
- Unit coordinator (Joel Day) and Head of Design School unhelpful with student problems (in particular, academic appeals).
- Sessional staff only on campus 2 days a week, and thus only approachable in person during these times.
- Use of sessional staff. Personally, I would rather have a full-time lecturer (or at the very least, a sessional staff member on campus more than 3 days a week).
- Not enough resource material given to students (e.g. lecture notes, online references etc). Multimedia students invariably teach themselves a lot of things, but we shouldn’t be expected to teach ourselves everything.
- Unit outlines lack depth and are unclear. The problems in the unit outlines range from ambiguous assessment criteria, lack of depth in description of assessments,
- Lack of SEEQ (Student Evaluation of Educational Quality) forms distributed in units. Some of you may have filled out SEEQ forms before….these should be given to students for EVERY course.
- Lack of accountability in SEEQ forms….most students don’t realise that it’s only the lecturers who hand out the SEEQ forms who actually get to see the results of it. Thus, if their unit has been criticised by the majority of students, they are not made accountable to improve their unit or teaching.
- The exam period not utilised for Multimedia Design students. Multimedia Design is one of the most time-intensive courses at uni. Despite this fact, while virtually every other student at uni has the exam period to use for study and exams, most of the Multimedia Design units have finished before the exam period has started. I’m sure most of you would welcome an extra week or two to complete animation projects. In addition to this, the uni semester has shortened by one week compared to previous years, but the workload still remains the same.
- Too much lecture time devoted to student presentations. Lecture time should be devoted to learning more about theory and practical knowledge relevant to the unit (e.g. in 3D Animation, topics weren’t covered in-depth due to the need to accomodate student presentations). The unit outlines need to be revised to put student presentations in tutorial times (which would make them more effective), and with lecture time used to teach us something useful.

There are several other problems I can outline, but I will start ranting if I get into them…

As 3rd year students who have had to put up with decreasing educational standards in our course, it is time to do something to get our course back on track. For those of us finishing next semester, we may only be able to give a wake-up call to the department, but at least that’s a start…all the other Multimedia Design students shouldn’t have to put up with the problems we have had to deal with.

For the record, in the discussions I have had with the sessional staff members who taught the units I was in last semester, I brought up a number of the concerns which I have just outlined….they all agree that the students are suffering in this course, but that there is not much they can do to help us, aside from talking to the course coordinator.

So I urge you all….PLEASE email Josh Wilcox at humanities@guild.curtin.edu.au with your concerns about the Multimedia Design course. He is VERY INTERESTED to hear more from the Multimedia Design students, and has told me he will have a much stronger position to bring about action if more students can contact him about their concerns.

Don’t forget, we pay good money to do this course….we deserve quality in return.

Regards,