Great lecturers and all info presented easy to understand. Reasonable expectations and great intro to psychology.

A refresher course of year 12 psychology with some year 11 psychology aspects. Even without doing any of the readings I achieved a HD, but I would strongly recommend doing the readings, if not all at least part of them to get some examples to apply your knowledge as it makes it a lot easier when revising for the exam.

The topic is fascinating and very well delivered, but I was lulled into a false sense of security by Lydia Woodyatt (Social Psychology) who is very reasonable about what we can be expected to absorb in one lecture. She is fun to listen to and she has lots of great advice about how to get motivated and be successful. Then Julie Robinson came along (Developmental Psychology). She starts out by warning us that we will never again hear any of the content she delivers, so we had better listen close and learn it properly now. She then proceeds to fit 4-5 lectures worth of content into each one. She speaks fast - as if she is in a panic because she knows it's nearly impossible to express that many ideas in such a short time. It feels like maybe the cops are after her and she's just trying to teach us everything she knows before they cart her off to a lifetime of incarceration. Sometimes what she talks about is relatively different information than what is covered on her slides. Often, there are 10 or 15 short sentences to a slide and it may be up for less than 3 seconds, but she still expects us to know the stuff. Maybe it has never occurred to Julie that covering so much info so fast might be counter productive from the student's perspective. I'm fairly sure she understands this, she just doesn't care. She is taking advantage of the fact that It's all recorded, so we are still expected to understand it all. Except... at least once, she started the lecture earlier than it was supposed to begin, so the video hadn't started recording and I missed whatever was said before that point. Either way, it takes a very long time to get through a recorded lecture. It's difficult to sort the key points from the less important details, and it's very hard to retain any of the info when you don't have time to stop and think about it. Don't get me wrong, Julie is excellent and the topic is very interesting, but it's extremely hard work compared with any other topic, and very stressful. If you did Psych in year 12, you may have an advantage here, because the information isn't new to you. I'm not yet very familiar with the 3rd lecturer, Michael Tlauka (Physiological Psychology) but so far he seems great and the content is interesting. I took one star off for "room for improvement" in general, and one star off because Julie Robinson makes me want to have a panic attack. I hope it is clear though, that my issue is both superficial and subjective. While my classmates are making similar complaints, they all seem to love the topic in general and I do very much agree with them. I would recommend it to anyone, but with the advice that you keep some time and energy in reserve for Developmental Psych, because it takes more than you might expect.

A great introduction to psychology for those new to the field. Covers lots of areas so gives you a taste of what's to come.