New media is a controversial thing, and people poorly understand what kind of vegetable this is. I poorly understand too. I'll try to tell about the courses and start with the one that's easy to describe - Game Studies.
This course is mandatory. In general, there are 3 specializations in new media, but since it's the Faculty of Arts, all specializations are mandatory, i.e. you can't choose just one. This specialization is the smallest, only 8 credits, i.e. 2 courses for all 2 years of study. In reality it's even simpler - it's one course divided into 2 parts.
Nothing speaks better about the course than the course description in the system :)
The course provides students with theoretical and methodological introduction to game studies. Game studies critically analyze video games medium and explore their broader cultural, social, and political aspects. The topics of the course include game studies theory, history of video games, video game design and development, video game analysis, and relationship between video games and new media. The course aims to develop students' ability to analyze video game mechanics and to critically reflect on the role of video games in contemporary culture and society.
Briefly - we'll learn theoretical and methodological approach to studying games (video games in particular), whatever that means.
The cool thing is that the course is taught in English, one less headache :) I really like courses in English, because almost all literature is in it, and terms don't get confused in my head.
Another plus is that the teacher actively uses the "Moodle" system (this is good, not bad), which means all materials, homework, literature are in plain sight. By the way, there are many materials, here's a picture for example:
On the very first class we were asked to divide into groups of 2-4 people, because the project will be team-based. I teamed up with a guy I met at the first meeting, plus 2 more people came to us, in general there were no problems finding colleagues :) By the way, Czechs' love for everything incredible is always pleasantly surprising, for example, someone will write about the role of people who changed gender in games. Such things.
In classes they tell us about games in general (but I'm too good at this, spent more than half my life with them), about history. We even talked a bit about games of Czech origin, but in my opinion almost everything shown was complete crap. They showed both modern projects, and my opinion, unfortunately, didn't change.
In the last class, for example, we asked ourselves what a video game is. We divided into groups of 4 people, each presented their definition. Easily lowered our self-esteem, because no one came close to anything even remotely comprehensive. But, on the other hand, we were cheered up by the fact that modern science still doesn't know exactly what can be called a video game and what can't. For example, is Facebook a video game? And according to some scientists' definition, it is.
And next Tuesday we were assigned to write an analysis of any video game according to a template, damn 2 pages of text came out. Everything's serious.
In general, the course is interesting, I hope I'll get my hands on writing the team project well, fortunately it seems not the laziest people gathered in my team :)