I personally found Communications to be ridiculously easy, I just finished it last term. Most of the concepts and stuff were really straightforward and self-explanatory, almost to the point you probably understood them before you took the course. There are a couple of journal entries (say an hour each), an opinion piece (a couple hours), a research/persuasive essay (takes a little more time), and a group presentation (not hard at all, basically regurgitating the week's lectures). This may be subject to change because a lot of people had issues with the way tutorials were being run, too much work/too little instruction, etc. but it should still be fairly simple. Point of reference, I never opened my books unless necessary to do a book-related assignment (I didn't even buy one of them), never studied, even for exams I only read over these "group notes" that a bunch of us collectively made, and found the exam really easy (all multiple choice, no dates and times, all concept based).
I will say though I was expecting more media studies kind of material, but it turned out to be almost "history of media studies" for the first half or so of the term. It was still kind of interesting, I guess. Oh, and no midterm.
