Some of you reading this may not like my review and may dismiss me as a bitter, miserable sod, which you have the right to do. However, I feel what I have to write is important as I've bottled up my feelings for years about this.
I graduated from the Journalism with a language course and as you can guess from the one star rating, I did not have a good experience there and was left feeling bitter and disappointed as a result.
When I was attending secondary school, the teachers wanted their students to do well. They were very helpful, approachable and supportive if we were having any difficulties and I am grateful for that. I expected lecturers to be the same as universities are being paid thousands every year. I thought by paying fees, I was going to be educated in return. Shockingly, this was not the case and in retrospect, I don't feel I got value for money. The quality of teaching in most of the lectures is appalling. To be brutally honest, I found most of the lectures tedious. Most of them involved the lecturers talking for hours and the students taking notes. One lecturer had power point slides, but he would leave gaps in his sentences. I remember we had a subject and the students were divided into groups. Each group had to read about a topic and we would have to make a presentation about it each week when it was our turn, the lecturer would just sit there and monitor. There was very little to no input from him throughout the entire semester in that subject. My point is reading a book is something we could all do at home, so attending his lectures seemed pointless. I was also shocked to learn in my first year that these lecturers aren't trained to teach which I personally believe has to change as this is not what I or other students paid for.
I also got the impression that most of the lecturers there didn't give a toss about their students. Lecturing was something they had to do and that was it. The lecturers seem to be passionate about their subjects but they don't instill that into students. They didn't go out of their way to help or support students, except for the woman who taught shorthand. She was one of the rare ones who genuinely cared about the progress of her students (probably because there was a high failure rate in shorthand). Sometimes, when I received a bad result on an essay, the lecturer would look down on me. I felt there could have been more individual meetings between lecturers and students to discuss their progress and the students could thus give feedback to lecturers. Handing out feedback forms to students at the end is just not good enough. In fairness though and on the other hand, the practical elements of the course are good preparation for students who want to work in a newsroom or radio in the future, so it does equip them with experience they can put on their CV when applying for jobs, but again, I felt the lecturers could have done more than just monitor.
The language classes were no different. I did French, so I can't discuss how the other languages were taught. What I noticed with Irish is that the students communicated with their lecturer entirely through Irish, so I think they flourished more than us. The French language classes could have been more interactive. There was no emphasis on speaking the language or communicating entirely through French. There was more emphasis on learning about French media. This was a shame as when I began my Erasmus, I didn't understand anyone who was speaking French to me (as the accent was so different) let alone how to ask for things in shops. This was something I picked up while I was in the country. The lecturers would talk about how students improved a lot from their Erasmus experiences and I think the reason that is because they have a need to use the language as they're in a foreign country whereas when they're in a classroom, they don't have that need and I think that's something that the lecturers need to address. read more