8. What's missing? What areas need further development?
Comment A: There is no essay really present, but again, we cover that in our OBS IV course through other elements.

Comments B: See edits re: format, wording, punctuation, spelling, etc. Other than those minor concerns, I find this material to be thorough and well developed. Samples of (well and poorly) completed units, plus the instructors mark and rubric and rationale for the mark, would also be very helpful.

Comment C: There isn’t an opportunity to get into in-depth work on how the media reports the news. The assignments look at the impact of the conglomerates on media, but there isn’t much attention to the actual news report. My view here stem from an older video called, I think, Reporting the News, that looks at how the US government influences the material in a TV broadcast. The video shows the reporter in Central America interviewing many villagers whose lives have been badly disrupted by guerrilla fighters backed with US dollars. He has hours of video but is only allowed a short segment of about 30 seconds. His editor, ever mindful of the money, chooses a very inoffensive portion that does not reflect the situation at all. It makes the US defined rebels look bad and the US backed guerrilla fighters look good. Yet that wasn’t the truth.

I don’t sense that the assignment opens up for students to move to this kind of investigation. There ought to be an opportunity to look at the front page of newspapers or watch a newscast and evaluate the type of editing that has gone into the production. Then the editing should be connected to the ownership issue. I think that our students need practice at the Ideas level to develop the skills to deconstruct a news report of some sort. Then they need to put the deconstructed piece in the perspective of the larger framework.

I had some reservations when I first read the assignments Media Controls and cultural policies (Unit 3, Assignment 1); it may be a bit too broad and general and involve more work than a short paragraph could do justice to. The questions give some good guidance, but our students, I think, would have a hard time getting started. Also, there may be more research and reading involved than the assignment suggests.