I took this class Winter of my first year because I want to apply to the Communications major. This class has interesting content that is fairly applicable to our everyday lives. It’s not too hard either! Professor Groeling has great lectures with an interesting, dry sense of humor. This course covers a broad topic, so we covered new units every day like “Advertising,” “Privacy,” “Government Repression,” and even the history of computers and the internet. The workload of this class involves a lot of reading and it can be challenging to keep up at times.

The grading is based on 3 Exams (18% each, 54%), Projects (40%), and Reading Quizzes (6%)

If you like to read peer-reviewed and news articles, you’ll love this class. Each class has 2-4 readings raining from 10-grade level to Graduate school difficulty. During the lecture, he will do a 1 question quiz through iClicker that also ranges in difficulty. I prepared for all of the classes and only missed 4 of the 25+ quizzes. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to make up those missed points.

The exams involve a 12 point test (short and long answers) and a 6 point, two pages, take-home essay. A good amount of questions that are on the exam was written by the class for a quiz make-up credit.

The projects are the most interesting. You will have a large menu of projects to choose from (ranging from 3-5 points) and must combine any of them to make 40 total points. There is only one mandatory group project (worth 10 points) that everyone in the class does at the beginning.

Overall, Professor Groeling runs a great class that I looked forward to most days. Even if I wasn’t particularly interested in one unit, I could often look forward to the next. I recommend you take this class, and if you put in some effort, your GPA will thank you.

The class is broken down into a couple parts: projects, exams, and quizzes. In the beginning of the quarter there will be a group syllabus project where you and a group are to revise a portion of the syllabus and add/remove readings. It can be a little a time consuming but overall not a bad project if you have a good group. If you decide to lead the group, your points are doubled. By the end of the quarter you need to have 40 project points and I suggest doing them all towards the start of the quarter so you can chill later on. Exams aren't that bad, with one portion of it being a short paper and then other portion short/long answer. The questions on the exams aren't too bad, as the class suggests them and he chooses which ever one he wants. I suggest making a shared doc with all the questions and answers so that you can study them. The only annoying thing about the class is the clicker quizzes every class based off of the readings. Most of the time you can get by with skimming the readings, but sometimes he asks more difficult questions. On the bright side he offers plenty of makeup opportunities to get those points back. Overall, not a bad class and won't take that much of your time if you do the work early.

I loved this class! Professor Groeling is one of the best professors in the Comm department and I'm really glad I got to take a class with him. The material for this class isn't super interesting for the first few weeks, but once the class gets going it's incredibly engaging because you cover a wide range of topics, including online journalism, social networking, government repression, hacking, etc. Basically anything involving communication online is within the scope of this course, which means everyone will find at least some of the topics engaging. The grading for this class is broken up into 40% projects, 6% in-class reading quizzes, and 54% exams (there are three exams that are 18% each and no exam is cumulative). It's on you to complete as many projects as you need to get you to 40% of the projects grade, and you can make up the quizzes you don't get right, so it's pretty easy to get an A in this class. The exams aren't hard – I never missed more than half of a point. Each exam also has a take-home essay that you can work either alone or with a group on. All in all, this class has a lot of material since it meets 3x a week, but Professor Groeling has structured the class in a way that makes it easy for students to do well. Plus he's one of the funniest and most engaging professors I've ever had!

This was honestly one of the most boring classes I have taken at UCLA, and I really don’t like Groeling’s teaching style. On the first day of class he had a screenshot of his bruinwalk reviews on his powerpoint as a way of telling us that people love his class which I thought was sort of weird. He has a sarcastic sense of humor which I found too much at times, like he was trying out a stand up routine and prove how clever he is. He also at one point told us to look up his salary and told us how much his house was worth, ostensibly to demonstrate how easy it is to find information about people online but it really felt like a weird attempt to flex his money. As for the class itself, at first the amount of reading he assigned for every class (3x a week) was way too much, there would be 5-6 often long articles we would have to read and then he would give a quiz on extremely minute details rather than quizzing us on the overall meaning or takeaways from the articles. Thankfully he gave us a survey to give feedback for him and I think enough people complained about the amount of reading that he reduced the assigned articles to 3 max per day. I did appreciate that he decided to assign 3 2-page papers rather than giving us tests because of the online format, and I thought the papers were pretty fair and easy to write. Overall I didn’t like the class or him as a professor but if you like his sense of humor I can see how the class would be more enjoyable.

One of the best professor in communication department. He is opened to help and his TA Mackenzie was really sweet and super helpful either. I was kind of confused about the assigned work materials at the beginning but ended up getting A+ on this class. We had quizzes everyday based on the assigned readings (one question from one reading), but the questions are fair and easy points. Plus he provides lots of quiz make-up opportunities as an extra credit so why not Comm 151 ? :)

Professor Groeling is amazing! The course material is a bit superfluous in the beginning, it takes a few weeks to really get into the interesting and relevant content, but Groeling did an amazing job at keeping us all engaged and participating! You start the quarter with a big group project, which was fun and allowed us to collab to revise his syllabus & lecture material. Throughout the quarter, he gives short quizzes every class based on the readings. Easy points and he also does plenty of quiz makeup opportunities. Also, he included guest lecturers who were professional and endearing. Prof Groeling really did his best to make this class as engaging as it could be virtually!

I really enjoyed taking this class! The professor was really thorough and always answered his emails. You can tell he loves teaching and he cares for his students. The class itself was fairly interesting, so lecture was very fun. He has clicker reading questions in the beginning of class so it was important to show up on time, otherwise you'll miss out. It's okay if you miss a few points because he has extra credit assignments to make up those points. The class starts off with a big project that revises the syllabus. He gives us a section of the syllabus and we had to decide to keep the old articles or find new articles for that week. I believe there were two midterms, both fairly easy since students were able to submit midterm questions. Each midterm has a take home essay, which were only two pages long. He also gives weekly mini projects that may be time-consuming. He takes points off for not answering all the questions or not going into details with your answer. It's okay if you lose some points since the max points you can get from the mini projects is 40 points. So you can skip some projects as long as you reach 40 points at the end of the quarter. Due to the pandemic, the final exam was 3 take home essays that were also two pages long.

I loved this class so much, probably one of my favorite classes I've taken in the comm department, I hope to take another class with Groeling! you can read the other reviews for a breakdown of how the class is graded but as long as you show up to class, there's no way to fall behind. the tests were extremely fair since the questions were written by students so we could study them beforehand. Groeling is always engaging with a great sense of humor and relatability to the students! even though the topic was something I never thought I would be interested in, he made it extremely relatable to our interests and I loved his lectures! so, if you are looking for a sign to take this class, here it is!

I like Groeling a lot because I can really relate to his humor and views on the world. He is extremely fair, extremely prepared, and always sleep-deprived. This class starts off with a big group project for revising the syllabus, which isn't too bad. I personally volunteered to be a leader for the double points and if you think you can lead the points are very very worth it to make the rest of the workload easier for yourself. The rest of the class you have to do small projects that are pretty easy to do, and you can choose which ones you want to do so you can do homework on your own schedule. There is a handful of articles to read each class with a clicker quiz, so it's kind of a lot of reading on that front but all things considered it's reasonable (not easy but fair). The exams were pretty good and fair as well (helped that the TA was very sympathetic towards us in grading). If you struggle with this, the one thing is that Groeling goes through lecture really fast (and sometimes still isn't fast enough). It is bruincasted but he talks really fast in class.

In all, I'd definitely recommend this class. It's not an easy class but it's definitely not a hard one--I thoroughly enjoyed the class and the reasonable workload and the class topics.

Groeling was a good professor. I took 151 and 160 during the same quarter, back to back. I thought the exams were easy because he lets students suggest exams questions, and then you just memorize the answers to those. Obviously only helpful if you have a good memory, but still a fun concept. People in his past classes on BruinWalk have said that he assigns too much reading, and honestly on some days it's a bit much, but I actually never really read them. As long as you know the main idea of the reading you're fine. On all of his iClicker Reading quizzes I got full points and I only skimmed each reading. Overall good class, wouldn't mind taking again if I had to.