Journalism students struggled with enrolment issues

Students attempting to add papers to their Postgraduate Diploma of Journalism were faced with error messages, causing confusion and uncertainty following the course’s 2021 structural changes.  

A spokesperson from the University said that the issue was administrative resulting from changes to the “programme undertaken taken last year not translating into associate rule changes”. The spokesperson went on to say that “Massey University recognises how incredibly frustrating for everyone this has been, particularly for the students”.  

James, a Journalism student, says that he had to go to academic advice for help, and even though they were “very kind, the best they could do for me was tell me to put all the courses I wanted to do through special permission, which takes an uncertain amount of time”. James also notes that the advice he was given was, at times, directly contradictory between different advisors. “I wasn't sure if I would be actually enrolled when the semester started, which resulted in a bunch of stress that could have been avoided with a working system.” He understands the unique situation of the course in an over-hauled curriculum, but is concerned that if one error like this could slip through the cracks, then other similar errors may have for other courses now or in the future.  

Another student told Massive that the situation was “a bit stressful and confusing. I wasn’t sure that people knew what I wanted and I don’t think the advisors knew about the new course. And I was just calling all these different people and they weren’t telling me the right information. The course advisors just didn’t know how the course was structured.” She went through three different student advisors, with the issue taking more than a month to sort out.  

Manager of Student Administrative Operations, Debbie Costello, told Massive she wasn’t aware of any specific technical difficulties with course enrolments for the year. However, since being contacted by Massive, Costello says she “found out that it wasn’t a late change to the course but rather that the now obsolete co-requisite requirement for the course had not been removed, so course enrolments were flagged for a manual check.” She says the error has since been corrected.  

Overall, there have been 26 inquiries into the PGDip in Journalism which Costello says “is 0.3% of all course enrolment inquiries since 1 October 2020 and 0.1% of all inquiries – about what we would normally expect”. However, James notes that only 15 people attend his class in-person and comments that 26 “seems high”.