Absolutely atrocious unit. Instructions for assignments are full of grammatical and spelling mistakes, assignments were always released late, and results were also always released late. Marking scheme for assignments is extremely lacking which means you will have no idea what exactly you're supposed to include for the assignments and will be punished for not including the exact answer that the marker was looking for. And in some cases, the chief examiner, Patrick Olivier, straight up lied by saying we didn't need to include certain things, and then we would lose marks from following his instructions and not including those details. Seriously, the marking for this unit was so bad that when the results for assignment 1 came out, there were hundreds of complaints in a matter of hours on the Ed forum of people furious with their marks. People were even accusing the chief examiner of using AI to mark the assessment because the feedback we received was poorly copy and pasted and barely relevant to what we had written. In some cases, people were even receiving blatantly stupid marks that anyone who spent five seconds proof reading would have easily spotted, such as a mark of 6/5 for a section. The fallout from the marking of this unit even ended up spilling onto other websites like the Monash Facebook and Reddit pages, people were that rightfully angry. My advice is to put off doing this unit for as long as you can and hope that Monash completely revamps the unit or replaces the chief examiner.

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2024

This is an OK unit. It's very broad and covers a range of things relating to research methods that are specific to IT. You learn about ethics, conducting literature reviews, creating surveys and interviewing people, collecting data and performing analysis and finally communicating research where you make a 90 second video. Tutors are very helpful, never went to the labs though. Lectures are split up into small weekly videos, which accompany weekly quizzes and submittables. Can do in your own time so that's good. Assignments were a mix of boring, time consuming and sometimes interesting, especially when you make a video, it gets the creative juices flowing. Overall it's a core for any FIT masters, don't expect much.

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2023