The Basics
- 100-percent online
- Minimum of three years of work experience
- Minimum of 3.0 undergraduate GPA
- One-, Two- or Three- year tracks
- Interactive weekly lessons
- Three areas of specialization
- Cohorts begin fall, spring and summer
- Student, faculty and staff support
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Download Courses and Sample Academic Plans
CAS 827: Digital Media Strategies
Course Description (core course)
This advanced course explores the strategic use of digital and social media in strategic communication. Despite widespread adoption, many professionals lack confidence in the effectiveness of their efforts. Students will learn to apply principles from advertising, consumer and social psychology, and marketing to design and evaluate impactful social media strategies. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will develop audience personas, assess tactics, and measure campaign success in today’s media landscape.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze current issues and evaluate trends in digital media technologies and applications.
- Evaluate the needs of an organization and different target audiences.
- Know the characteristics of promotional media mix plans and produce digital media consultancy reports.
- Differentiate the key strengths and weaknesses of conventional and new media.
- Use medium strengths to determine an effective multimedia promotional strategy for a specific product or service.
- Identify and apply research and communication theory to inform media mix decisions and digital media strategies.
- Develop and evaluate budget scenarios for different media mixes.
CAS 828: Persuasion Techniques for Working Professionals
Course Description (core course)
This course explores the principles of persuasion and compliance, focusing on the key processes that influence attitude and behavior change. Students will learn how to craft persuasive messages, analyze real-world examples in corporate and cultural contexts, and understand audience resistance and strategies to overcome it. The course also examines how audience traits, communicator credibility, and message design interact to shape persuasive outcomes.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the primary processes that affect the magnitude to which, and the way attitudes and behavior are changed.
- How to construct messages to induce these processes.
- Identify and analyze examples of persuasive communication in corporate and cultural contexts.
- Understand how audiences resist persuasion and learn techniques for inoculating against resistance.
- Understand the interplay between audience and communicator characteristics and message design.
CAS 829: Evaluation Techniques for Working Professionals
Course Description (core course)
This course equips students to conduct, commission, and critically evaluate social scientific research. Whether leading your own project or working with outside researchers, this course builds the foundational knowledge needed to ask the right questions, understand research design, interpret data, and assess results. Topics include the philosophy of social science, research design, and basic statistical methods.
Learning Objectives
- Develop skills in using qualitative and quantitative research methods in professional communication.
- Understand how to define a research problem and prepare a research plan.
- Conduct research, analyze results and interpret and communicate the findings.
- Analyze and critique research findings based on understanding of validity criteria.
CAS 831: Digital Content Creation, Curation, and Promotion
Course Description
This course focuses on creating content for digital platforms, including email, social media, websites, and other interactive media. Students will apply design and communication principles to develop effective written and visual content, using tools such as Adobe Photoshop. The course also addresses content strategy, management, and curation within an integrated digital communication plan.
Learning Objectives
- Identify the multitude of options for digital media communication (online, mobile and social media).
- Strategically identify when and how to use digital content to obtain desired outcomes.
- Articulate an overarching vision for the creative design, management, and implementation of online and social media content.
- Apply visual communication and interaction design principles to create effective online content.
- Write and edit copy of various digital media, based on an understanding of how new media and digital content differ from traditional media and print material.
- Know what makes copy newsworthy and important (vs. "click bat").
- Manage diverse content using a content management system and aggregation tools.
- Develop an integrated digital content curation strategy and use search engine optimization techniques to maximize content reach.
CAS 832: Strategic Message Development
Course Description (core course)
This course offers a research-based framework for designing effective strategic messaging in communication. Students will learn to conduct stakeholder analysis, define outcomes, craft persuasive messages, and engage target audiences. The course takes an integrative approach, drawing on insights from marketing, psychology, communication, and creative writing to enhance message impact.
Learning Objectives
- Create a demographic and psychographic profile of the target audience, along with specific features of the audience that will be important for message design.
- Analyze and identify trends in their specific market communication environment and implement their conclusions in their communication strategy.
- Develop an understanding of the complex relationships among various stakeholders and will learn strategies for managing conflict among stakeholders.
- Incorporate audience data and communication theory to design messages with greater effect.
- Write compelling messages that leverage strategies from persuasion, narrative, negotiation, and relational communication research.
- Develop a taxonomy of persuasive appeal strategies and a knowledge of when to deploy each.
- Develop messages that are appropriate for a variety of media and understanding of how to use these different messages to enhance and complement each other.
CAS 833: Crisis Communication
Course Description
This course builds skills for communicating organizational crises through effective media strategies. Students will explore crisis types—including natural disasters, accidents, human error, and intentional incidents—and learn how to deliver timely, accurate information to the public and stakeholders. Emphasis is placed on crisis prevention, risk communication, and response planning.
Learning Objectives
- Present the concept of crisis management in terms of distinct phases of progress (pre-crisis, crisis event, and post crisis).
- Understand key concepts, including building a crisis-sensing effort based on issues management, risk management, and relationship management.
- Cultivate the ability to diagnose crisis vulnerabilities by identifying the missteps of major crisis events in U.S. history.
- Differentiate between crisis types.
- Select crisis team members.
- Demonstrate effective spokesperson skills.
- Construct a crisis management plan.
- Explain the need to practice the crisis plan throughout the organizations.
- Assess the appropriateness of a crisis response.
CAS 835: Branding and Image Communication
Course Description
In this course you will examine the power and value of branding and using consumer-based brand equity to differentiate a product, service or company from its competitors. Related issues include the way brands are created, managed and grown, and extensions under the brand umbrella.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the purpose and nature of branding.
- Differentiate between brands, logos, and products.
- Explain importance of brands and branding efforts and the limitations of branding efforts.
- Apply those concepts to the brand(s) of products, persons, or ideas.
- Develop understanding of the relationship of multiple brands held by a single organization, and the problems and opportunities associated with co-branding.
- Develop a personal vision of how one can contribute to brand development and integrity.
CAS 837: Catalyst Thinking in the C-Suite
Course Description
In today’s fast-paced global workplace, executive leaders must continuously strengthen their skills in creative thinking, problem-solving, and strategic communication. This course equips students with research-driven insights and practical tools to lead organizational change. Key topics include communication, collaboration, conflict, and change—core competencies for C-suite leadership. Students will learn to apply these principles to become effective agents of change.
Learning Objectives
- Develop leadership and communication skills necessary for success in the C-suite.
- Improve their ability to quickly critically assess and address problematic workplace scenarios for productive outcomes.
- Identify successful models of leadership so they can better champion key. organizational priorities and necessary organizational changes.
- Better communicate and instantiate organizational core values to motivate organizational members to reflect those values to both internal and external stakeholders.
- Identify, analyze and solve critical organizational problems they currently need to address by using course material as the basis for their organizational solutions.
CAS 838: Organizational Communication for Leaders and Entrepreneurs
Course Description
This course introduces theories, contexts and processes related to organizational communication issues, including employment interviewing, supervisor-employee communication, role and work group coordination, decision-making and unit climate. This course will also include an overview of research on organizational communication through time and discuss coordination within and between organizational communication structures.
Learning Objectives
- Understand and apply relevant principles, theories, and research findings.
- Understand and apply basic communication competencies.
- Understand and apply the communication skills needed to build and function within teams.
- Practice strategies that enhance their ability to facilitate meetings.
- Develop a presentation that “pitches” an idea that will increase the effectiveness of an organizational process or introduces an innovation.
CAS 839: Media Analytics for Communication Professionals
Course Description
This course introduces key concepts and tools in media analytics, including the role of big data, audience measurement, and consumer response to advertising and news. Students will explore data sources, experiment with popular analytics platforms, and examine ethical and privacy issues. The course provides a foundation for more advanced study in specialized analytics areas.
Learning Objectives
- To provide students with a basic understanding of what media analytics involve and how they are useful to professionals in journalism, advertising and public relations.
- To review, critique, and understand what scholars and practitioners have said or written about media analytics.
- To sensitize students to ethical and privacy issues involved in the application of media analytics.
CAS 840: Audience Analytics
Course Description
This course will cover basic concepts of digital analytics and actual use of live data to generate consumer insights on major aspects of a website or mobile app, such as user profiles, traffic sources, navigation patterns, conversion ratios and path to purchase. It will also cover how to interpret analytics and put it into a strategic plan.
Learning Objectives
- Introduce basic concepts, processes and uses of media analytics.
- Explore the rise and characteristics of big data; data acquisition about audiences, media consumption and response to advertising and news.
- Sources of commercial and news data; overview and experiment with some of the popular analytics platforms and tools for advertising and news.
- Data analytics for consumer/reader/user insights.
- Overview user privacy and ethics issues of media analytics.
CAS 841: Social Media Storytelling
Course Description
The digital revolution has transformed how stories are researched, created, and shared. This course prepares students to navigate and leverage social media platforms for effective storytelling. Emphasizing key industry trends and best practices, students will develop qualitative skills in finding, verifying, interpreting, and crafting compelling stories for online audiences.
Learning Objectives
- Be familiar with the current scholarship on social media, news and information.
- Identify the challenges brought by each unique social media platform.
- Recognize the ways professional communicators can inform and engage the public via social media.
- Master using social media as an awareness system to alert you about trending stories.
- Learn how to cover breaking news via crowdsourcing.
- Reflect on current conversations around issues of verification, misinformation, privacy and inequality.
- Learn how to verify information from social media.
- Learn how to defuse and debunk misinformation from social media.
- Learn how to control and strategically plan your social media presence.
CAS 842: Professional Communication Ethics
Course Description (core course)
This course examines how events, politics, laws and people have shaped professional ethics and ethics codes in the U.S. The course will train you to identify ethical issues across media communication industries - specifically those in journalism, public relations and advertising and across convergent media like social media, broadcast TV and radio, and other visuals such as advertisements and photojournalism. Case studies across the industries and media will illustrate a diversity of ethical decision dilemmas. The course will encourage self-examination of one's own ethics and the role of ethics in one's profession.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the history, principles, role and consequences of professional communication in a democratic society.
- Develop a taxonomy of approaches to ethical decision-making that apply to professional communication.
- Choose appropriate approaches, principles and frameworks for thinking through complex ethical issues.
- Recognize that multiple conclusions are possible when different principles are applied to the same problem.
- Examine the similarities and differences between ethics codes and standards across industries.
- Develop an understanding of the role of culture and government in the creation and application of ethical principles including differing assumptions among countries.
CAS 844: Capstone/Practicum
Course Description (core course)
This asynchronous capstone course is the final requirement for Strategic Communication M.S. program students. Designed as a campaigns course, students can integrate and apply the skills and knowledge developed throughout the program. Working individually, students will research, design, and present a comprehensive strategic communication campaign for a simulated client.
Students will engage in a structured, self-paced format with weekly milestones, check-ins, and peer feedback. Course readings and assignments will guide students through each phase of campaign development—from initial needs assessment to strategic planning and final recommendations—mirroring professional practice in strategic communication.
Learning Objectives
- Demonstrate the importance of project management as it relates to digital media.
- Differentiate between planning, executing, monitoring and controlling project work.
- Describe the relevance of and integration of project management knowledge areas and processes.
- Understand organizational and functional structures and their influence on deliverables.
- Identify stakeholders and effectively manage client expectations.
- Apply project management principles and techniques to a real-world project.