This course is just a waste of time. Do NOT enrol unless:
a) You just want a line on your CV
b) You intend to work abroad where an MSc from a UK University sounds fascinating
and even in those cases, it's still not worthy. It can tire you so much - especially now that all modules have 'critical evaluation' essays - and you will gain nothing tangible out of it.
I personally just lost all hope with the DMTA module aka 'learn everything by yourself'. Not that I had high expectations anymore, but this module is the definition of a waste of time and money.
The course itself is violating almost all of the Programme Specification and some parts of the Guide to Assessment. Anything you read about the course on the York webpage does not correspond to reality. It doesn't teach anything close to 'industry-relevant content' and certainly does not prepare you for any kind of job. The Head of the course, is defending the level of content by saying 'it's 30% tutor input - 70% self-learning'. It is impossible to find time to finish the content, finish the assignment AND do additional 'self learning'. Even if you wanted to invest all your time on learning, anything you learn on the modules is so basic and theoretical that you would be in a better position if you started learning on your own in the first place. Tutors do NOT have time to help you with any queries not directly related to the content and will refuse to help you with any queries on previous modules. So you just have a 'broad' introduction to the topic of the module and do enough of each 'sub-topic' so that you consume all your time reading without learning anything applicable or anything that will help you to learn anything applicable. I could write 100000 words about how much it sucks but just to give people and idea.
To answer a few previous questions:
1) The group complaint was submitted 6 months ago and so far there has been no improvement in any aspect of the course and no final decision (even though typically there is a 5-week 'deadline' to get a decision). There were some changes to the structure of the course and the modules and their only objective is to allow more students to enrol. Although, recently they're trying to do a few things but I suspect these are directly related to the group complaint and the involvement of the legal department.
2) A year and a half since the course was launched, they still have no idea how to deliver the IRP. If you don't know, the course has around 8 tutors so the students to tutor ratio is around 100 to 1 instead of the advertised 25 to 1 - and these tutors are more like part-time tutors for us. Based on my communication with people of the Uni the IRP will be a disaster. They cite the length of the module as a justification for the possible limited scope. But, if you account for the other IRP-related modules (RM:2 months,PP:2 months, IRP:4 months) it seems like the length should not be a problem. But, it appears that the PP module will not be directly related to the IRP. As in, the objective of the module will be to present a project proposal and we will be marked on that but it's not necessary to do the proposed topic for your IRP. Personally, I don't feel like anything I've learned so far can put me in a position to select a meaningful project on my own - let alone work on it on my own. Also, it appears that the course has limited control over the tutors and it's probably up to them how much time they will invest on each student. And here is the issue, they will most likely not be of much help because they will need to simultaneously supervise IRP projects, teach their real classes and whatever else they do offline, reply on canvas to online students and mark assignments while the course has done nothing to fix the student to tutor ratio and it accepts more than 250 students every 2 months. Also, if you follow the Data Analytics path where you MUST have an IRP on Data Analytics it appears that no tutor is suitable to supervise such project. Most likely, most students will be forced to do some kind of braindead report which will be the ultimate waste for this course.