Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Media and Communications
| Intake Date | Programme Type | Course Fees |
|---|---|---|
| Click here to know more | Bachelor’s Degree | Click here to know more |
Beacon International College and its partner reserve the rights, at its discretion, to change, modify, add or remove the course information at any time without prior notice. Please check the course information periodically for changes.
Introduction
BA (Hons) Media and Communications provides an innovative and customisable learning experience where students develop a diverse grounding of media theory and practice before choosing a bespoke strand – either Media Production or Media Studies.
Benefitting from a course team combining field-leading academics and experienced creative professionals with excellent industry links, students will engage in self-directed learning within a stimulating and flexible environment. Graduates from this course will be equipped with skills relevant to the creative, multi- and trans-media industries.
The Media Studies strand aims to give students a wide knowledge of the social and cultural debates that surround media forms and institutions. Graduates will bring to the world of work a critical understanding of the processes of media production and consumption, which they will have applied in both media analysis and their production work.
The Media Production strand aims to give graduates a future proof skillset that extends across this ever-evolving industry. Through hands-on technical modules underpinned by theory, taught in state-of-the-art radio and television studios, students will develop a wide range of specialist skills in addition to an awareness of pitching concepts, client relations and creative talent management.
Course Content
The Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Media and Communications comprises of 360-credit modules from the following list determined by the College:
This is an intensely practical module, which lays the foundation for video work later in L4, and in modules at L5 and L6, as well as for future employability. You will learn the basics of filming, including camera operation, lighting, and recording sound. You will also learn the basics of editing, including sound mixing for video, structuring and scripting, and how to research stories for video.
This module is an introduction to the field of media ethics and its repercussion in terms of policies and laws. You will critically analyse and participate on a range of historical and topical debates in the areas of policy and ethics in the field of media and communications, such as ‘freedom of speech’, ‘fake news’, ‘the role of the state’, ‘civil society’ and ‘digital citizenship’.
Learn the basics of video production and film grammar, developing your skills as a filmmaker. Using hands-on exercises, you will learn photography, video, lighting, sound and scriptwriting.
This practical module will provide a foundation of live radio production skills. The module will take you through a range of radio aspects that are both behind the mic and production focused.
Dive into the world of audio production and storytelling through podcasts. Enhance your voiceover skills, audio recording, sound design and web design/publishing skills.
This module introduces you to a range of cinematic and television genres, including horror, action, fantasy, science fiction and comedy. You will explore the visual, structural and thematic conventions that define genre and cinematic style, and you will examine why these conventions are considered culturally and industrially significant. In addition, the module will consider how genre conventions both reflect and shape social values, identities and power structures.
Through a critical lens informed by Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), you will evaluate how issues of representation—such as race, gender, sexuality, class and disability — are constructed, challenged or excluded within different genres. You will also learn how production techniques such as camera angles, lighting, and sound are used to support or subvert genre expectations in diverse narrative contexts.
During Year 2, you will complete the listed compulsory modules and one optional module determined by the College.
Additionally, you will choose ONE course pathway – either Media Production OR Media Studies – to follow until the end of the course.
Each pathway contains two compulsory modules and a choice of one optional module determined by the College. See below for more information.
The aims of this module is to provide you with the opportunity to:
- identify potential professional opportunities and goals
- develop the skills and personal networks to make effective applications
- develop a real-life understanding of contemporary industry/organisational practice
- identify core competencies to support your future career
- cultivate a critical understanding of your strengths and weaknesses in a work-based situation
- develop your online professional presence and add elements to your portfolio of practical work (while refreshing key production skills).
This module seeks to develop the strategies and skills required to research, plan, and execute creative, integrated campaigns. With a focus on creative collaboration, Media and Communications students work with other students from across the school and from the L6 BA (Hons) Ad & PR year group to formulate an integrated campaign in response to a live client brief.
While creative collaboration is key, this module also promotes a dynamic understanding of the shift towards the “experience economy” – essential to any creative communications professional.
Throughout, and in addition to peer learning opportunities, students will benefit from lectures in industry best practice from instructors and guest lecturers, creative workshops, pitch clinics, and visits.
- To identify and evaluate research sources and data that are applicable, appropriate and focussed;
- To explore the role of applicable research strategies in contemporary promotional communication;
- To develop the ability to critically refelct and interpret a wide range of research and relevant campaigns;
- To encourage the ability to effectively select the appropriate means of communication to apply relevant research.
This module explores how visual media, with which we interact daily as both consumers and producers of images, inform our very seeing and understanding the world. The module introduces strategies and key theoretical and critical concepts to enable you to work on images and the visual, to think and write critically about images (in a variety of media). It will also give you the opportunity to work with images – to use images critically as part of your reflections and writing. Topics and key concepts covered include: image production and image reproducibility, analogue and digital media and technologies, ‘machine vision’, forms of spectatorship, digital economy and labour, self-representation and images and/as data.
Students will gain the opportunity to specialise in an extremely creative and investigative research strand of audio production, through the pitching, planning and production of a short audio documentary artefact.
They will further develop their critical listening skills by analyzing and reflecting on broadcast and online works, whilst furthering this knowledge within critical academic reflective writing, enabling them to explore in detail, the genre of audio documentary and subsequently apply this knowledge into their own practice.
This module introduces students to the disciplines, workflows and outputs of complex video production, primarily in the factual or factual entertainment genres. Work will include both location recording and a full programme or programmes, whether from a studio or using streaming technology.
It builds on skills learned in Video Production and Video Documentary Production at L4 in filming, structuring, editing, and scripting to build programme content aimed at broadcast and/or online, and leads towards final year projects.
This module aims to provide students with tools of the trade and support as they begin to find their own creative voice. It is organised around lecture slots and workshops during which reading from the previous week will be discussed in relation to their own projects. In addition to set reading, there are also weekly practical exercises which students need to complete. Whilst each screenplay is an individual project, students will workshop their screenplays in groups through stages of development to understand the importance of re-writing as well as writing. Students will gain pitching skills and techniques to help them through the process and will learn how to deal with and use constructive criticism of their work. Students will refine rewriting skills by analysing scripts by their fellow students, as problems are often more clearly seen in scripts, they are not so close to, and such understanding can then be applied to their own piece. Hence students will be asked to write a script report and contribute to critical discussion.
This module concentrates upon the migration of form and content between different texts and media, with a focus on the generation and expansion of fictional worlds. Underpinned by explorations of worldbuilding, intertextuality and convergence culture, theories of adaptation, intermediality, and transmedia storytelling are explored through key examples from film, literature, TV, videogames, new media, visual arts, and many other media.
This module will examine the changes that have been effected socially and culturally by the transition from analogue to digital media technologies and the accompanying globalisation of media connectivity in political, financial and cultural networks. It will investigate how digital and social media affect contemporary social conditions (including working practices, domestic organisation, surveillance, and so on) and understandings of the self and others.
This module concentrates upon the migration of form and content between different texts and media, with a focus on the generation and expansion of fictional worlds. Underpinned by explorations of worldbuilding, intertextuality and convergence culture, theories of adaptation, intermediality, and transmedia storytelling are explored through key examples from film, literature, TV, videogames, new media, visual arts, and many other media.
This module will examine the changes that have been effected socially and culturally by the transition from analogue to digital media technologies and the accompanying globalisation of media connectivity in political, financial and cultural networks. It will investigate how digital and social media affect contemporary social conditions (including working practices, domestic organisation, surveillance, and so on) and understandings of the self and others.
Students will gain the opportunity to specialise in an extremely creative and investigative research strand of audio production, through the pitching, planning and production of a short audio documentary artefact.
They will further develop their critical listening skills by analyzing and reflecting on broadcast and online works, whilst furthering this knowledge within critical academic reflective writing, enabling them to explore in detail, the genre of audio documentary and subsequently apply this knowledge into their own practice.
This module introduces students to the disciplines, workflows and outputs of complex video production, primarily in the factual or factual entertainment genres. Work will include both location recording and a full programme or programmes, whether from a studio or using streaming technology.
It builds on skills learned in Video Production and Video Documentary Production at L4 in filming, structuring, editing, and scripting to build programme content aimed at broadcast and/or online, and leads towards final year projects.
This module aims to provide students with tools of the trade and support as they begin to find their own creative voice. It is organised around lecture slots and workshops during which reading from the previous week will be discussed in relation to their own projects. In addition to set reading, there are also weekly practical exercises which students need to complete. Whilst each screenplay is an individual project, students will workshop their screenplays in groups through stages of development to understand the importance of re-writing as well as writing. Students will gain pitching skills and techniques to help them through the process and will learn how to deal with and use constructive criticism of their work. Students will refine rewriting skills by analysing scripts by their fellow students, as problems are often more clearly seen in scripts, they are not so close to, and such understanding can then be applied to their own piece. Hence students will be asked to write a script report and contribute to critical discussion.
In this module, students develop a Media Project over two semesters. The project is devised as a substantial piece of work that draws on the skills and concepts students have learnt in all the previous modules on the course. The Project outcome will be an artefact, for example, an audio documentary, podcast or website. Students will produce a piece of work of their own choice and can work either independently or in a team.
The focus of this module is the staged development of a research project, an extended piece of written work equivalent to a minor dissertation, which encourages practitioners to conceptualise and theorise their process and products in greater depth.
This L6 module will provide an introduction to the concept and practice of creative entrepreneurship, which resonates with both UWL’s institutional positioning as ‘the career university’ and the stated aim of Ambition 2018 to link learning with the world of work. At this stage of their academic career, undergraduates are beginning to focus on their transition from student to creative practitioner and the content of this module is designed to build on that momentum and encourage them to lay the foundations for their future success. Working in partnership with W5 productions as well as stakeholders outside the academy, students will be encouraged to become the disruptors, collaborators and pioneers of future creativity.
The major aim of this module is to teach students the concept of practice-led research, and to reaffirm the reflective practitioner/critical creativity theme of the course. The module does this by tying together knowledge and practice developed by the students across their degree, with a particular focus on re-uniting the two strands at the end of their studies in a complementary way; requiring them to work together by drawing on (whilst building on) their specific skills.
This module provides the opportunity for students to challenge conventional wisdom in the search for the unexpected as solutions to design problems.
In this module, students will research, develop and execute audio concepts that challenge the limitations of the radio/audio soundscape. This will include reference to gaming, interactive sound design and other digital media.
The dissertation is an independent study programme, in which students investigate a topic of their own devising, in consultation with the module leader and an allocated supervisor.
In this module students develop a project over a single semester. The project outcome will be an artefact (for example, a short film, podcast or website) that takes an issue relevant to Media & Communications as its theme (see ‘Aims of the module’). Students’ choice of appropriate technology will be guided both by the module tutor and by the previous modules they have studied. The module is an opportunity to synthesise creative skills and critically-informed knowledge of the Media & Communications field.
This module concentrates upon the treatment of bodies and identities in fictional representations of alternative or future societies, and uses specific moving-image texts to explore theories and critical ideas.
The major aim of this module is to teach students the concept of practice-led research, and to reaffirm the reflective practitioner/critical creativity theme of the course. The module does this by tying together knowledge and practice developed by the students across their degree, with a particular focus on re-uniting the two strands at the end of their studies in a complementary way; requiring them to work together by drawing on (whilst building on) their specific skills.
This L6 module will provide an introduction to the concept and practice of creative entrepreneurship, which resonates with both UWL’s institutional positioning as ‘the career university’ and the stated aim of Ambition 2018 to link learning with the world of work. At this stage of their academic career, undergraduates are beginning to focus on their transition from student to creative practitioner and the content of this module is designed to build on that momentum and encourage them to lay the foundations for their future success. Working in partnership with W5 productions as well as stakeholders outside the academy, students will be encouraged to become the disruptors, collaborators and pioneers of future creativity.
The module aims to collectivise the various ways in which students have undertaken philosophical reflections on media throughout their course, to introduce them to new ideas to promote further study, and to act as a conceptual capstone for their academic engagement over the course of their degree.
Admission Criteria
Age Requirement
At least 18 years old
Academic Requirement
- At least GCE A-Level (112 UCAS points and above) or equivalent qualification, along with GCSE, or Level 2 equivalent pass in both English and Maths (at least Grade C).
Exceptional Entry:
Candidates who do not possess the normal minimum entry qualifications are considered on an individual basis by the University. A mature candidate shall be at least 30 years old and possess a minimum of 8 years of working experience.
Admission with Credit (Advanced Standing):
Students with an appropriate HND/C in the relevant discipline or equivalent can transfer directly onto the degree. Other students wishing to enter the course may apply on the basis of RPL and RPEL for admission with Credit
English Entry Requirement
- Overall IELTS 6.0 with minimum 5.5 in all components,
- or the equivalent
Key Facts
Accredited by: University of West London
Students may refer to the here for more information.
Course Length:
36 Months (Full-Time & Part-Time)
Minimum Class Enrollment Requirements:
Master’s Degree: 10 students
Bachelor’s Degree: 10 students
Higher Diploma: 6 students
Diploma: 6 students
English Courses: 6 students
Please note that classes will only commence once the minimum enrollment requirement for each programme is met.
Support for students and their learning:
- All students studying in Beacon benefit from the team of dedicated tutors who provide a point of personal and regular contact for students
- An induction programme both for first year students and direct entry year two or three students
- Student handbook, programme handbook and individual module handbooks
- Module content and materials via Moodle Virtual Learning Environment
- Library and study skills packages
- Library and learning resources of both Cardiff Metropolitan University and Beacon
- 24 hour wifi, photocopying & printing services, library with PCs and laptop recommendation services
- Unlimited worldwide web access
- Access to student services including those offered by careers, welfare and counselling.
Teacher-Student Ratio
Students may refer to the here for more information.
About University of West London
At the University of West London, we’re preparing graduates for today’s world and the challenges of tomorrow. With roots tracing back to 1860, UWL is a modern university based in West London that emphasises practical, career-led learning, student satisfaction, and strong industry engagement. It is ranked:
- Ranked 41st in the UK in The Guardian University Guide 2025.
- Named Best Modern University in London in the Times and Sunday Times University Guide 2026.
- Achieved #1 in London university for overall student satisfaction in the National Student Survey 2025.
- Top university in London in the People and Planet University League 2024/25.
- 5th university in the UK for student experience in the Daily Mail University Guide 2026
- THE World University Rankings 2026: placed in the 1021-1500 band.
- THE Impact Rankings 2025: in the 601-800 band.
- Research Excellence Framework (REF): ~80% of submitted research rated as “world-leading (4*)” or “internationally excellent (3*)”.
Find out more about the University of West London: https://www.uwl.ac.uk
