Featured Courses

Blogging 101: Create, Content Development, SEO

Students will learn the fundamentals of creating a blog, generating and formatting blog content (including the use of audio, images and video), optimizing for search engines and social media marketing, and publishing. The class will culminate with students pitching their blogs to real companies and websites. “This course was structured to meet the varied needs of the professional world, so instruction will come from a slightly different standpoint than traditional college courses that focus on theory,” Professor Winship says. “The blogging course will blend theory and practicality, giving students an opportunity to immediately apply what they learn in class.”You may not find this course at many colleges and universities, but you will find it at STAC. To add to the college’s new concentration in Social & Interactive Media, faculty member Elaine Winship and adjunct instructor Tom Winship created a blogging course, in which students will build their own blogs and learn how to leverage them to maximize social media marketing impact and search engine results.

Social Media Marketing

Examines the life cycle of the social media marketing and communications process — from strategy to implementation to program monitoring and measurement; addresses the applications of social media through hands-on experience, developing skills in the most widely used social platforms. (Also offered as MKTG 340.)

TV News Show Production

This course requires students to produce news programming of substantial quality, including video television news, topical news discussions, and investigative reports. Students will examine the elements of studio news production, including the pre-production, planning, scripting, and recording of a weekly TV news show. Contemporary and historically important broadcast news/documentary journalists and anchorpersons will be studied and evaluated. Prerequisites: CA 221 and CA 325.

Communication Skills in Business

Practical application of communication theory to a sequence of projects progressing from writing of memoranda, letters and resumes to more advanced problems of persuasion, interviewing, research and proposal and report writing. Prerequisite: ENG 102. Recommended for juniors and seniors.

Sport Media

Overview of coverage of sports by all media: print, radio, television, and electronic. Study of sports coverage through lectures, analysis of tapes, field trips, and guest speakers.

New Media Communications

This course will explore how media technology has altered our way of life over time, with an emphasis on recent technological changes. It will also explore technological determinism vs. social determinism. Does technology change society or does society change technology? Is technology an extension of the human (early Marshall McLuhan) or is it an autonomous force that alters communication and thus, patterns of behavior. Students will explore the effects of technology on business and marketing, politics and war, education and learning, social behavior and perception, family life, language and writing, relationships and dating, publishing, literature, and art. They will consider whether new media, in particular social media, have expanded our knowledge base or caused information overload. They will also look at the consequences of the emerging Web 3.0 platform, which includes mobile communications.