Courses

An exploration of communication theories and organizational practices that support effective employee onboarding and socialization.

Upon successful completion of this class, students will be able to:

• Analyze the role of communication in integrating new members into an organization.
• Apply relevant communication theories to explain the dynamic processes of employee socialization in various workplace contexts.
• Evaluate onboarding program design and delivery to determine their effectiveness in achieving individual and organizational goals.
• Use communication theories and concepts to analyze human behavior, including in interpersonal, family, group, health, organizational, or mediated settings.
• Apply communication theories and concepts to social and professional life, including issues of diversity, ethics, and civic engagement.

Examines leadership from a communicative perspective, integrating theory and practice. Combines traditional information components of university courses, with experimental learning activities such as interactive simulations, exercises, case studies, and an organizational simulation.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Apply communication theories, concepts and skills to the study and practice of leadership.
• Understand fundamental perspectives, theories and concepts of leadership as they apply in relationships, groups, organizational and civic settings.
• Demonstrate an analytic/critical perspective relative to leadership perspectives, theories and concepts.
• Systematically assess individual, group and organization leadership practices and situations.
• Acquire enhanced experience and competency in, and commitment to, personal leadership in relationship, group, organizational, and civic settings.

This class explores facets of patient-provider communication and their impact on patient and provider satisfaction and health outcomes.

 Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Describe characteristics of the U.S. healthcare system and analyze their influence on patient-provider communication.
• Appraise the models of the patient-provider relationship and consider how they have framed patient-provider communication.
• Compare different methodological approaches to studying patient-provider communication (e.g., communication as perceptions, as attitudes, as behavior).
• Identify features of patient-provider communication and social/ecological factors (e.g., technology, medical interpreting, physician training) and explicate their significance for the patient-provider relationship and/or health outcomes.

Application of principles and techniques in a targeted health communication campaign; social norms theory, experiential learning theories, effects of misperceptions on behavior, and needs of special student populations.

 Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze the theoretical and pragmatic bases of health communication campaigns, in general, and dangerous drinking prevention campaigns specifically.
• Describe themselves as products and producers of culture and indicate the implications for them as instruments of both reinforcing and changing the culture of college drinking.
• Apply lessons learned from the scholarly literature on the social norms and brief intervention approaches to prevention of dangerous drinking among college students.
• Explain basic information about addiction and the challenges faced by students in recovery on a college campus.
• Create innovative RU SURE Campaign messages and implement campaign strategies in new locations.

This course will cover principles and methods of identifying, categorizing, and segmenting mass audiences. The more specifically a PR or MarCom professional identifies targets by demographic or other means (and where they can be found) the easier it is to find communication strategies and tactics that will reach those targets.  This course is designed to give the PR or MarCom professional these tools and awareness.

This course is ideal for the PR and MArketing Communication student who is looking to learn, by better defining his/her target audience, how to expose hot buttons for copy content and style, SEO/SEM keywords, hook development, and more.

Greater success of message delivery is gained by determining: where your target audience is, the best message placement, types of event development and venues, which will expose ideal strategic alliance and joint marketing opportunities, as well as develop and provide support for marketing and business decisions.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze a produce or service offering and formulate, evaluate, and communicate conclusions and inferences to determine an ideal target audience from industry-acceptable media/marketing tools and sources of quantitative information.
• Develop and present a communications plan designed to reach a desired target audience using a variety of media choices, and begin to understand the complexities of budgeting and execution.

Research projects conducted under the direction of individual faculty members. Requires application.

Advanced topical seminar dealing with issues of concern to contemporary communication studies.

Advanced topical seminar dealing with issues of concern to contemporary communication studies.

Advanced topical seminar dealing with issues of concern to contemporary communication studies.

Advanced topical seminar, dealing with issues of concern to contemporary communication studies.

Issues in theory building in the field of communication.

Advanced topical seminar dealing with issues of concern to contemporary communication studies.

Family communication theory, research, and practice. Includes assessment and measurement of interaction patterns, pathologies, and intervention strategies.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Understand and articulate the fundamental concepts and theories related to family communication.
• Demonstrate mastery of these concepts by applying them to current social issues and questions related to family life.
• Demonstrate your ability to gather evidence to explore, understand, and debate possible outcomes of these issues with their classmates.
• Conduct independent research on family communication topics, and to demonstrate this ability through reviews of the literature and by successfully conducting an interview on family communication processes.

Research trends in current literature in interpersonal, group, organizational, mass, and intercultural communication, and in public relations and advertising.

Independent study projects in communication. Requires application. Does not count toward the major. Ranges form 1-3 credits.

Independent study projects in communication requires application. Does not count toward the major.

Ranges from 1 to 3 credits.

Ranges from 1 to 3 credits.

Supervised study in communication pedagogy. Reserved for tutors.  Requires application. Does not count toward major.

This course is a quantitative and mathematically rigorous introduction to concepts that underlie the Internet and Web search engines. A challenging problem will introduce each topic, and the exposition of principles and relevant theorems will be followed by an application to the Internet, and at least one other application in the Social Sciences (e.g. social networks) or the Humanities (e.g. author identification).

The course counts as one of the two mathematics courses that must be taken in order to meet the Rutgers graduation requirements in quantitative reasoning.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Do and explain elementary examples of the quantitative processes underlying the internet information environment.
• Discuss the relations of these processes to the social and economic impacts of that environment.
• Be better prepared to contribute in the information environment, understand its strengths and weaknesses.
• Serve as leaders in an ever-changing world of technology.

This course provides a survey of the key social issues related to information technology development, decision-making and use. Its focus is on the critical analysis of social, cultural, philosophical, ethical, legal, public policy and economic issues relating to information technologies, and how these interactions shape workplace decisions and technology use.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze social aspects of information technology including benefits and drawbacks of technology implementation.
• Identify and evaluate sources and tools they can use to support decision-making and discussion in the work place.
• Identify approaches to resolving social dilemmas surrounding information technology development, decision-making and use.
• Develop documents on best practices with information technology for organizational use.
• Demonstrate new information technologies in such a way as to convey both the social assumptions built into the system and potential impacts of the system on social relations, work-life and productivity.
• Describe the value of social informatics in professional and intellectual disciplines.
• Apply skills of persuasion, argument and effective written communication in relation to social issues.

As the introductory course to the technological concentration/area in the ITI program, Introduction to Computer Concepts explains the basic principles of computer systems and applications. It covers the basic mathematical-theoretical principles that govern the functioning of computers, the architecture and organization of computer systems, the role of hardware and software, and the role of creative thinking and problem solving in building software applications.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Understand the difference between hardware and software, the architecture of the computer and the functioning of software.
• Use a variety of applications to organize, process, store and retrieve data.
• Understand the principles of computer programming and write simple applications such as macros and Web scripts.
• Use the computer in a networked environment and access remote resources and services.
• Create and publish simple webpages.
• Demonstrate competency with technical terminology and ability to communicate with IT professionals.
• Develop creative thinking and problem solving skills.

This course introduces students to the principles of object-oriented analysis, design and programming. The focus is on developing creative thinking for analyzing a problem domain and designing a solution, and on using the Java programming language (or other appropriate programming language) to implement it.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Apply critical thinking to analyze the requirements of a simple application and build a model of the problem.
• Use the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and object-oriented design principles to develop a conceptual solution.
• Use the Java programming language to implement the designed solution.
• Use visual programming tools to sketch and build simple user interfaces.
• Apply testing and debugging to ensure the correctness and efficiency of the application.

This course focuses on the relationship among information, technology, and people in an applied context. Students will learn to define design-problem spaces, represent the problem, and suggest sociotechnical solutions.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Explain challenges in developing sociotechnical systems for diverse individual, group, and societal stakeholders.
• Explain how sociotechnical systems affect how professionals communicate, collaborate, and interact. 
• Identify a design problem and score a design space.
• Model sociotechnical systems to bridge the needs requirement as identified by designers and the features to develop by engineers or developers (specifically, using Unified Modeling Language).
• Demonstrate presentation construction and delivery skills that effectively communicate design problems and proposed solutions.

This course will examine video games from a cultural and social perspective. Rather than focusing on game design, it will explore the ways culture, socialization, and values are a part of gaming. Using a variety of theoretical & methodological approaches a range of topics will be discussed in an attempt to understand not only the internal workings and social dynamics of computer games, but their place in the broader culture. Topics include: community management and maintenance in games; social processes and interaction; games as communication spaces and virtual worlds; intellectual property and commodification in games, players as producers of game content, political/ideological analysis of games; gender and race in gaming; and design & values.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze the social impacts of video games including the historical and cultural influence video gaming has had on society.
• Identify approaches to understanding the social and technical components within a video game in regards to design, production, marketing, and play.
• Deconstruct the video game playing experience in such a way as to convey both the social assumptions within video game design and the cultural reconfigurations performed by players as they adapt games to meet their goals.
• Synthesize arguments related to issues of gender, race, class, desire, pleasure and play when viewing video games as artifacts.
• Apply skills of persuasion, argument and effective written communication in relation to the social impacts of video games.