Micro Units & Courses

Throughout history, communication has always been about telling compelling stories. The technology has changed but this essential truth remains.

In this micro unit students will learn concepts, frameworks and techniques for effective storytelling that engages target audiences across various social media platforms.

Key issues in the use of social media will be explored, including cross-cultural storytelling as well as the ethical issues of privacy, protection of personal identity and professional branding through social media.

Social media is constantly evolving, and social media skills are essential for anyone looking to find work in the digital communication space, particularly for social media managers and entrepreneurs, digital performance analysts, media researchers, digital journalists, and digital policy and media analysts.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

The evolution of digital technology has had a disruptive and ultimately transformative effect on communication and media industries.

Students studying this micro unit will learn about how the communication and media landscape has changed with the advent of digital technologies, including the radical shift in industry business models and the conditions of media content creation and distribution.

Students will assess specific platforms, in particular social media platforms, and gain an understanding of the user cultures that have developed around them. This will be particularly useful for students working or intending to work in the digital social media space, whether as a social media specialist, manager or entrepreneur.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

This unit will cover topics that:

1. Outline shifts in thinking that have influenced how autism has been conceptualised from a historical, medical, and neurodiverse perspective.
2. Discuss how these shifts in thinking relate to inclusive ideals and medical and social models of disability.
3.  Highlight key attributes of autism that relate to:
   1. emotions, relationships, and the social relational world,
   2. differences in processing information related to cognition, language, and sensory information and
   3. celebrating strengths, interests, aspirations, and support needs.
4. Discusses how the environment plays an important role and can be an enabler or barrier to autistic learner success.
5. Highlights how the environment needs to support and promote the attributes of the autistic learner and acknowledge, understand, and support autistic strengths and needs.

In this unit you will explore practitioner-led approaches to research, a form of research that values and promotes the knowledge of practitioners such as teachers.

You will learn about a range of approaches within this family of research. For example, design-based research; action research; and participatory action research. By doing so you will cover the specifics regarding the roles of practitioners and researchers, as well as research problems, design methods, and issues of rigour.

The unit will culminate in the preparation of a practitioner inquiry proposal.

Investigate the architectural principles that underpin modern computer systems: how they are structured and how they operate.

In this unit you will build your own computer system using simulation software, learn about the ongoing evolution of computer systems, and master fundamental hardware and software concepts that allow you to understand the building blocks that comprise computer systems.

Price: $1,542

Organisations are continually transforming to leverage the potential of information systems. A key part of this ongoing evolution is ensuring leadership teams are aware of the nature of an information system, how best to manage its components and subsystems effectively, and how to make informed decisions based on data.

The purpose of this is to provide insights into how to appropriately identify issues facing organisations, and then develop information systems that help resolve these issues.

Drawing on real-world case studies, you explore core concepts including the components of information systems, the design cycle, business analytics, and ethical and privacy considerations.

Price: $1,542

Object Oriented Design is a methodology that identifies potential objects and classes by analysing programming models, allowing you to solve complex problems with real-world implications. Basing software design on entities that exist in the real world maximises the chance that software architecture will age and evolve gracefully, primarily because the choice of objects remain stable.

In this unit you will learn about and apply standard software design principles such as SOLID, DRY, KISS and YAGNI. Crucially, you will learn how such designs are professionally communicated and used as part of agile design processes.

Price: $1,542

This is a 6 credit point micro unit.

This micro unit introduces students to the role data analytics play in the delivery of effective social media communication. The history, theory and methodology of social media data analytics frame the unit’s overall aim of teaching how data analytics can be used to improve engagement with online audiences and communities through social media platforms.

Price: $1,296

Digital technologies provide professional communicators new ways to craft, deliver and evaluate the impact of communication. This micro unit integrates a theoretical understanding of how computational technologies transform the world of communication, along with the hands-on skills to use and create programs within Python to collect, manage, process and analyse the digital traces of online communication.

Price: $1,296

This unit will cover the following topics:

1. An examination of historical and current literature on cognitive theories that have been used to inform our understanding of how an autistic learner may experience their environment.
2. An examination of co-existing conditions autistic learners may experience that may influence environmental adjustments that are required.
3. An examination of how these theories and co-existing conditions may influence the implementation of suitable adjustments for autistic learners in inclusive learning environments.

The design and use of surveys is an important aspect of Education research, and vital in the way it informs curriculum decisions and evidence-based teaching methods.

In this unit you will gain knowledge about conceptualising, designing, conducting and evaluating survey research, thereby helping you build “survey literacy”. You will learn how to develop research questions/hypotheses, basic statistical modelling for hypothesis testing, and how to design a survey questionnaire that can produce essential data.

Ultimately you will be encouraged to consider using survey research to problematise, inform, or improve contemporary educational practice.

Cyber security breaches – network infiltration, malware attacks, personal and corporate data theft – are commonplace and on the rise. In an increasingly globalised world with interconnected computer systems, the risks of malicious cyber security attacks are already threatening to have a global impact.

This unit introduces essential information security concepts such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. You will study the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model in order to better understand network communications, and enhance your ability to identify information security vulnerabilities and threats in a range of networked scenarios.

You will develop a practical skill set that allows you to identify and anticipate cyber security risks and vulnerabilities, and work towards reinforcing cyber security practices in an organisation through the use of numerous strategies including cryptography, identity control, and general network and communications security.

Price: $1,542

Database management is both a technical challenge for businesses and organisations, as well as a societal and ethical one.

This unit covers the design thinking behind rigorous database management, standard database querying techniques, all in accordance with the ethical aspects of data management, storage and use.

You will study conceptual data modelling techniques to understand, analyse and capture an abstraction of the complex data aspect of business domains. By doing so you will learn to design a database from a relational database schema and implement effective, ethical and culturally sensitive solutions to database management problems.

Price: $1,542

Data structures define modern computer science, for instance those used to represent strings, dictionaries, lists, trees and graphs.

In this unit you will learn and implement the algorithms commonly used for searching, sorting and processing these data. You will learn both how to assess the efficiency of these algorithms and distinguish between those that can process large amounts of data efficiently, and those that run unacceptably slowly as the size of the input grows.

Price: $1,542

This is a 6 credit point micro unit.

Digital technologies have had a tremendous impact on our lives as individuals and members of larger societies. The debates surrounding these new and powerful technologies are often multi-faceted in their complexity.

In this micro unit, students will learn to critically examine and contribute to these debates, drawing on scholarly research to evaluate opposing perspectives.

This is an essential skill for digital communication professionals intending to remain critically informed in their field, and who are likely to secure work in a wide range of roles across government, industry and community sectors.

Example of these roles include working as social media managers and entrepreneurs, digital performance analysts, media researchers, digital journalists, and digital policy and media analysts.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

This unit helps students develop an understanding of the ethical considerations that underpin education design, development and review of contemporary educational research.

You will explore the core principles and behaviours that govern responsible research conduct, and learn why research ethics and integrity are so important, and how these issues relate to different research methodologies and special populations.

IT systems are powerful tools capable of solving business problems, but to do so operational problems need first to be identified and defined. This unit equips you with both soft skills – to collaborate as part of a team and identify problems – and technical skills in system design to navigate complexities and solve problems.

You will apply visual communication tools as analytical tools to explain design outputs and gain feedback from users and peers, after which you will devise elegant design solutions to resolve contemporary industry problems.

Price: $1,542

Programming is a technical skill well worth taking the time to master. Even if you haven’t learnt any programming in the past, this unit will introduce you to the basic building blocks of programming algorithms: sequence, selection, iteration, and how algorithmic thinking itself is used to break down problems into simpler steps.

Using C# language to express these steps in universal programming language, you will learn about the imperative style of programming in which a sequence of statements change the program’s state.

You will learn practical troubleshooting skills, and how to debug and test programs to ensure their correctness, as you simultaneously develop an understanding of program syntax and compiler errors.

Price: $1,542

Knowing how to make sense of data for diverse audiences, through appropriate visual representation, is a key skill for contemporary digital communication professionals.

This is especially true at a time when there is a growing demand across communication and media industries for communication specialists who can interpret and effectively communicate datasets to non-specialist audiences and those in leadership positions.

The focus of this micro unit is on understanding the principles of visual communication and data analytics within a broader digital communication context.

Specifically, students will engage with common types of data representation, from simple histograms, scatter plots and treemaps to complex networks and Sankey diagrams. This advanced knowledge will be invaluable for those navigating careers in the digital space, particularly those intending to work as digital performance analysts, media researchers, and digital and media analysts.

Industry-standard software applications will be used to create interactive data visualisations.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

Program logic models depict the activities or actions taken in a program, and the expected short, medium and long term outcomes expected to be achieved. For example, in an education context, when a school introduces a new transition-to-school program, what activities does it actually involve (classroom visits, parent information sessions); and what outcomes and aims are desirable in the short term (child comfort in the setting) as well as the longer term (parental engagement with the school).

The process of developing program logic models helps individuals and teams in many fields better articulate exactly what it is they are trying to achieve in their work, and acts to bring everyone onto “the same page”.

In this unit you will learn about the theory and practice of program logic modelling within education contexts, and its uses for program development and evaluation as a type of research.

Object oriented programming is a multi-dimensional method of combating complexity, particularly when developing larger programs. In this unit you will explore the key concepts of abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism.

• Abstraction is the process of naming known quantities and identifying common properties of a collection of objects.
• Encapsulation is the process “putting things in a box” – selectively exposing some aspects of what’s in the box, but deliberately hiding other aspects.
• Polymorphism is the concept of an object being able to have different forms.

By using the C# programming language in combination with these concepts, you will learn how to break down complexity and develop practical programming solutions.

Price: $1,542

Explore the conceptual frameworks that guide web application development, learning how frameworks such as Bootstrap and Python-Flask are integral to robust and effective web development.

This unit covers the web development process, from initial design to development and finally deployment.

You will gain hands-on experience with the model view controller (MVC) architecture pattern, and learn about the specific functionality of MVC components, and how these contribute to the software architecture of a web application. You will also make use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are managed through MVC platforms.

Price: $1,542

Throughout history, communication has always been about telling compelling stories. The technology has changed but this essential truth remains.

In this micro unit students will learn concepts, frameworks and techniques for effective storytelling that engages target audiences across various social media platforms.

Key issues in the use of social media will be explored, including cross-cultural storytelling as well as the ethical issues of privacy, protection of personal identity and professional branding through social media.

Social media is constantly evolving, and social media skills are essential for anyone looking to find work in the digital communication space, particularly for social media managers and entrepreneurs, digital performance analysts, media researchers, digital journalists, and digital policy and media analysts.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

The evolution of digital technology has had a disruptive and ultimately transformative effect on communication and media industries.

Students studying this micro unit will learn about how the communication and media landscape has changed with the advent of digital technologies, including the radical shift in industry business models and the conditions of media content creation and distribution.

Students will assess specific platforms, in particular social media platforms, and gain an understanding of the user cultures that have developed around them. This will be particularly useful for students working or intending to work in the digital social media space, whether as a social media specialist, manager or entrepreneur.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

This unit will cover topics that:

1. Outline shifts in thinking that have influenced how autism has been conceptualised from a historical, medical, and neurodiverse perspective.
2. Discuss how these shifts in thinking relate to inclusive ideals and medical and social models of disability.
3.  Highlight key attributes of autism that relate to:
   1. emotions, relationships, and the social relational world,
   2. differences in processing information related to cognition, language, and sensory information and
   3. celebrating strengths, interests, aspirations, and support needs.
4. Discusses how the environment plays an important role and can be an enabler or barrier to autistic learner success.
5. Highlights how the environment needs to support and promote the attributes of the autistic learner and acknowledge, understand, and support autistic strengths and needs.

In this unit you will explore practitioner-led approaches to research, a form of research that values and promotes the knowledge of practitioners such as teachers.

You will learn about a range of approaches within this family of research. For example, design-based research; action research; and participatory action research. By doing so you will cover the specifics regarding the roles of practitioners and researchers, as well as research problems, design methods, and issues of rigour.

The unit will culminate in the preparation of a practitioner inquiry proposal.

Investigate the architectural principles that underpin modern computer systems: how they are structured and how they operate.

In this unit you will build your own computer system using simulation software, learn about the ongoing evolution of computer systems, and master fundamental hardware and software concepts that allow you to understand the building blocks that comprise computer systems.

Price: $1,542

Organisations are continually transforming to leverage the potential of information systems. A key part of this ongoing evolution is ensuring leadership teams are aware of the nature of an information system, how best to manage its components and subsystems effectively, and how to make informed decisions based on data.

The purpose of this is to provide insights into how to appropriately identify issues facing organisations, and then develop information systems that help resolve these issues.

Drawing on real-world case studies, you explore core concepts including the components of information systems, the design cycle, business analytics, and ethical and privacy considerations.

Price: $1,542

Object Oriented Design is a methodology that identifies potential objects and classes by analysing programming models, allowing you to solve complex problems with real-world implications. Basing software design on entities that exist in the real world maximises the chance that software architecture will age and evolve gracefully, primarily because the choice of objects remain stable.

In this unit you will learn about and apply standard software design principles such as SOLID, DRY, KISS and YAGNI. Crucially, you will learn how such designs are professionally communicated and used as part of agile design processes.

Price: $1,542

This is a 6 credit point micro unit.

This micro unit introduces students to the role data analytics play in the delivery of effective social media communication. The history, theory and methodology of social media data analytics frame the unit’s overall aim of teaching how data analytics can be used to improve engagement with online audiences and communities through social media platforms.

Price: $1,296

Digital technologies provide professional communicators new ways to craft, deliver and evaluate the impact of communication. This micro unit integrates a theoretical understanding of how computational technologies transform the world of communication, along with the hands-on skills to use and create programs within Python to collect, manage, process and analyse the digital traces of online communication.

Price: $1,296

This unit will cover the following topics:

1. An examination of historical and current literature on cognitive theories that have been used to inform our understanding of how an autistic learner may experience their environment.
2. An examination of co-existing conditions autistic learners may experience that may influence environmental adjustments that are required.
3. An examination of how these theories and co-existing conditions may influence the implementation of suitable adjustments for autistic learners in inclusive learning environments.

The design and use of surveys is an important aspect of Education research, and vital in the way it informs curriculum decisions and evidence-based teaching methods.

In this unit you will gain knowledge about conceptualising, designing, conducting and evaluating survey research, thereby helping you build “survey literacy”. You will learn how to develop research questions/hypotheses, basic statistical modelling for hypothesis testing, and how to design a survey questionnaire that can produce essential data.

Ultimately you will be encouraged to consider using survey research to problematise, inform, or improve contemporary educational practice.

Cyber security breaches – network infiltration, malware attacks, personal and corporate data theft – are commonplace and on the rise. In an increasingly globalised world with interconnected computer systems, the risks of malicious cyber security attacks are already threatening to have a global impact.

This unit introduces essential information security concepts such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. You will study the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model in order to better understand network communications, and enhance your ability to identify information security vulnerabilities and threats in a range of networked scenarios.

You will develop a practical skill set that allows you to identify and anticipate cyber security risks and vulnerabilities, and work towards reinforcing cyber security practices in an organisation through the use of numerous strategies including cryptography, identity control, and general network and communications security.

Price: $1,542

Database management is both a technical challenge for businesses and organisations, as well as a societal and ethical one.

This unit covers the design thinking behind rigorous database management, standard database querying techniques, all in accordance with the ethical aspects of data management, storage and use.

You will study conceptual data modelling techniques to understand, analyse and capture an abstraction of the complex data aspect of business domains. By doing so you will learn to design a database from a relational database schema and implement effective, ethical and culturally sensitive solutions to database management problems.

Price: $1,542

Data structures define modern computer science, for instance those used to represent strings, dictionaries, lists, trees and graphs.

In this unit you will learn and implement the algorithms commonly used for searching, sorting and processing these data. You will learn both how to assess the efficiency of these algorithms and distinguish between those that can process large amounts of data efficiently, and those that run unacceptably slowly as the size of the input grows.

Price: $1,542

This is a 6 credit point micro unit.

Digital technologies have had a tremendous impact on our lives as individuals and members of larger societies. The debates surrounding these new and powerful technologies are often multi-faceted in their complexity.

In this micro unit, students will learn to critically examine and contribute to these debates, drawing on scholarly research to evaluate opposing perspectives.

This is an essential skill for digital communication professionals intending to remain critically informed in their field, and who are likely to secure work in a wide range of roles across government, industry and community sectors.

Example of these roles include working as social media managers and entrepreneurs, digital performance analysts, media researchers, digital journalists, and digital policy and media analysts.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

This unit helps students develop an understanding of the ethical considerations that underpin education design, development and review of contemporary educational research.

You will explore the core principles and behaviours that govern responsible research conduct, and learn why research ethics and integrity are so important, and how these issues relate to different research methodologies and special populations.

IT systems are powerful tools capable of solving business problems, but to do so operational problems need first to be identified and defined. This unit equips you with both soft skills – to collaborate as part of a team and identify problems – and technical skills in system design to navigate complexities and solve problems.

You will apply visual communication tools as analytical tools to explain design outputs and gain feedback from users and peers, after which you will devise elegant design solutions to resolve contemporary industry problems.

Price: $1,542

Programming is a technical skill well worth taking the time to master. Even if you haven’t learnt any programming in the past, this unit will introduce you to the basic building blocks of programming algorithms: sequence, selection, iteration, and how algorithmic thinking itself is used to break down problems into simpler steps.

Using C# language to express these steps in universal programming language, you will learn about the imperative style of programming in which a sequence of statements change the program’s state.

You will learn practical troubleshooting skills, and how to debug and test programs to ensure their correctness, as you simultaneously develop an understanding of program syntax and compiler errors.

Price: $1,542

Knowing how to make sense of data for diverse audiences, through appropriate visual representation, is a key skill for contemporary digital communication professionals.

This is especially true at a time when there is a growing demand across communication and media industries for communication specialists who can interpret and effectively communicate datasets to non-specialist audiences and those in leadership positions.

The focus of this micro unit is on understanding the principles of visual communication and data analytics within a broader digital communication context.

Specifically, students will engage with common types of data representation, from simple histograms, scatter plots and treemaps to complex networks and Sankey diagrams. This advanced knowledge will be invaluable for those navigating careers in the digital space, particularly those intending to work as digital performance analysts, media researchers, and digital and media analysts.

Industry-standard software applications will be used to create interactive data visualisations.

A micro unit is an ideal format for intensive learning, allowing students to fit flexible blocks of study into their schedule – one micro unit for part-time study and two micro units for full-time study.

Price: $1,296

Program logic models depict the activities or actions taken in a program, and the expected short, medium and long term outcomes expected to be achieved. For example, in an education context, when a school introduces a new transition-to-school program, what activities does it actually involve (classroom visits, parent information sessions); and what outcomes and aims are desirable in the short term (child comfort in the setting) as well as the longer term (parental engagement with the school).

The process of developing program logic models helps individuals and teams in many fields better articulate exactly what it is they are trying to achieve in their work, and acts to bring everyone onto “the same page”.

In this unit you will learn about the theory and practice of program logic modelling within education contexts, and its uses for program development and evaluation as a type of research.

Object oriented programming is a multi-dimensional method of combating complexity, particularly when developing larger programs. In this unit you will explore the key concepts of abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism.

• Abstraction is the process of naming known quantities and identifying common properties of a collection of objects.
• Encapsulation is the process “putting things in a box” – selectively exposing some aspects of what’s in the box, but deliberately hiding other aspects.
• Polymorphism is the concept of an object being able to have different forms.

By using the C# programming language in combination with these concepts, you will learn how to break down complexity and develop practical programming solutions.

Price: $1,542

Explore the conceptual frameworks that guide web application development, learning how frameworks such as Bootstrap and Python-Flask are integral to robust and effective web development.

This unit covers the web development process, from initial design to development and finally deployment.

You will gain hands-on experience with the model view controller (MVC) architecture pattern, and learn about the specific functionality of MVC components, and how these contribute to the software architecture of a web application. You will also make use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are managed through MVC platforms.

Price: $1,542