University of New England (UNE) reviews

To preface this, I have had a few decent lecturers at UNE, and I have just entered my third year of study online. Unfortunately, many of the lecturers that I have had do not seem to understand the basics of how to teach, or how students absorb information. 

As an example, this trimester I have two lecturers.
The first one does not 'believe in' PowerPoint presentations. This means that he will just stand there and talk for about an hour. I have no way of knowing what we are learning about, other than the Topic title for the week. There are no lecture slides period. 

The second one records the lectures on Zoom with her camera off. She has also informed us that the school left up the wrong information so we all have purchased the incorrect textbook for this unit.

As someone who works full time, it is very difficult to follow along with a lecture with no reference material whatsoever.

It also makes me wonder, if I received an assessment where I was to prepare a video/audio presentation, would I receive a high mark if I sat there with my camera of, talking into a microphone? I think if I were to do this, I wuld likley fail the assessment. I have no idea why this is apparently acceptable for lecturers.

I would not recommend attending this university. I am currently exploring ways to transfer to an alternaitve university with hopefully better standards of teaching

They decided that my biology degree somehow doesn't count as a relevant degree for biology. I need to redo a bunch of 1st year science units, despite my having studied the subjects up to Masters level already. This is apparently about being "fair" to all students (I'm assuming that means they do this to people regularly).

I was also repeatedly given bad advice about what was going on and how to proceed. If I'd understood what was really happening I probably would have applied at other unis, not continued wasting time. 

I have enjoyed the units I've taken and found teaching to be up to a high standard. But having to retake 1st year level units over and over is something I have literal nightmares about. So I will be finding another uni.

UNE is a pipeline school. If you do everything that they tell you to do, you will get a good NCLEX or MCAT score. However they do not care if you succeed. There is a strong expectation that you are responsible for your own education. A lot of people complain that UNE expects you you to teach yourself, and that is kinda true. There is little to no support for students, and if you find yourself struggling, UNE is more than happy to let you fail. Tuition is expensive, and honestly, the courses are about par with SMCC or CMCC in terms of quality. UNE is a great place to go if you just need a piece of paper to get a job. UNE is not a good place to go if you want an education.

TLDR: consider studying somewhere else if you are planning to do online learning.

I am studying a unit at UNE through cross-institutional study, so my experience is pretty limited. However I'd like to share my experience so far. The teaching staff have been very unprofessional and disorganised.  The sole lecturer for the unit was away for the first two weeks, and did not set up the Moodle site properly (e.g. unfinished content, incorrect lectures uploaded, not enough information on assessments even though we were told to start them right away.) The lecturer also had to take further time off due to contracting covid, even though the unit is entirely online and he could have easily worked from home to fix the issues which were preventing all the students from progressing through the content. It really gives me the impression that the staff are not that invested in teaching. Also, as far as I can tell there is no clear way to find out whether attendance actually affects your grades or not, where this should be clearly stated.

Also, my home university is notorious for having a very confusing online learning platform, and I thought ours was bad, but Moodle is hell on earth. The way things are laid out is so unclear and confusing, and there is virtually no guidance given on how to use the site (there is a tutorial but it really taught me nothing). There is so much information hidden under all these little secret tabs and things and I don;t think I'll ever fully understand how it works. It also looked incredibly outdated. 

I'd also like to mention that the unit I am taking frequently has "notes" on Moodle that use terms that I have never heard in my life, which are left undefined. I have no idea what is being talked about a lot of the time because I'm just expected to know what specialist terms mean. Furthermore, I have noticed several examples of incorrect referencing and formatting, which doesn't really give me a lot of faith in the teaching staff.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend UNE online to anyone. I hated my home university for its unprofessionalism and disorganisation, but now that I've had this experience, I'd much rather study there than UNE.