Communication skills are essential to employment and to society's smooth functioning. Universities are a prime environment for students to learn and hone these skills. However, communication within the academy has historically been conceptualised narrowly due to logocentric forces. When students experience different communication modes, it tends to be in a siloed fashion where they learn about one skill at a time, leading to a fragmented, uneven experience. As such, this study seeks to understand how communication is defined, assessed, and supported in Australian university introduction to communication classes. It does this first through reviewing relevant unit outlines to see how they define and position communication by mode (written, spoken, or visual). Second, using a national survey, academics who coordinate relevant units provided more concrete details about how their units are structured, supported, and about barriers that exist for equipping communication students to work in today's multi-modal digital world.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.