Hi there, thanks for making this thread. I haven't been able to find any reviews of this course anywhere. Have you found out more?
I share your assessment that this course could be very similar to the York one, but could potentially be a better option depending on how invested Birkbeck is in the delivery (which is reportedly a problem, though not a deal-breaker, where the York course is concerned).
Birkbeck is, in theory, a very good institution, but so is York. There is an advantage to having run a course for several years already, and where Birkbeck might still be fixing the most glaring shortcomings in the incipient year of the course, we can expect York to have gone through such a quality control-by-experience process already.
On the other hand, this being a new course, there could be an advantage in that the student-lecturer ratio might possibly be much lower than at York, which could (again, depending on how invested Birkbeck are in this course) lead to more one-on-one time with the lecturers. This could, again, be either a good or a bad thing, in that more attention from the lecturers could make it harder to pass the course during stressful phases at work.