UG Course Descriptions

An introduction to voice and body work in front of the camera through basic elements of anchoring, weather reporting, sports casting, interviewing, and commercial reads for both radio and television.

This course covers translating marketing objectives into media objectives, analyzing audience data and estimating costs, as well as buying and selling advertising time and space for radio, television, Internet and mobile. Students will learn to evaluate all major media assessing their inherent strengths and weaknesses to ultimately develop focused media campaigns and compelling media presentations.

Introduction to the theory and practice of programming for electronic media, including broadcast radio and television, cable TV, satellite radio and TV and online video and audio.

An extention of the broadcast performance class focusing on finer skills sets of broadcast arts culminating in a full-class project benefitting the university. (Pre-requisite: COM 217)

How do we talk about “health?” How should important health information be delivered? Can we really create healthy behaviors through targeted communication? In the first half of the semester, students will be introduced to issues in doctor-patient interaction, social and cultural perspectives on health, mass media representations of healthy and risky behaviors, and communication within health organizations. In the second half of the semester, students will develop health communication campaigns designed to address real-world health problems through the application of health communication theory and research.

This course focuses on the language, form, presentation value, and effective communication of email, business and corporate websites, blogs, wikis, microblogs and professional social networking sites as a response to and in continued anticipation of cultural shift to on-line self-sufficiency.

Introduction to and analysis of literary, sensory, technical, genre-based, and production aspects of film. This will largely be accomplished via film clips and reaction papers. A cohesive study of entire films presented in long papers will culminate the course.

A survey of the historical development and contemporary issues of both print and non-print media with a focus on mass media as it pertains to our digital world today. This course is a deliberate review of basic communication theory and seeks to comprehend the historical contexts of major mass media entities while developing a capacity for strategic thinking when considering media.

Media, the great monolith, and the entity that is so full of biases and light on objectivity thrives in this hyper-connected, reflexive, postmodern world, and it is not going away; in fact, it will only continue to be exacerbated, so one might as well strive to be media literate, at least in a cursory sense. That is where this course comes in. Media, collectively, are full of narratives and intents seeking audiences and attention. However, media literacy is very much about the stories we as audiences generate about said media. A one semester course cannot offer a comprehensive understanding of media literacy, but attempts at providing some structure, insight, confidence, and agency in relation to understanding and engaging media are realistic expectations.

This course investigates the relationship of women and media through film, television, magazines, news, politics, advertising, and the internet. Media, collectively, are full of narratives and intents seeking audiences and attention. However, media literacy as it pertains to women is very much about who or what is driving those stories and the cultural impact they leave upon us. The ultimate goal is to determine if there are women in media today who are self-actualized enough to transcend stereotyping and exploitation and what our cultural response is to such women.