Semester I

This course examines the intricacies of negotiation. Students learn how to plan negotiations and become familiar with best practices in managing negotiations and getting past impasses and deadlocks. Communication skills building are explored to enable students communicate directly. Students learn the consequences of poor communication and how to avoid it through open communication and fixing communication breakdowns that may heavily impact on negotiation.

This course examines fashion as a form of communication and culture. Through cultural and media studies theory, we will examine how fashion makes meaning, and how it has been valued through history, popular culture and media institutions, focusing on the relationship between fashion, visual self-presentation, and power.

This course is a practical survey of the law governing communication, especially practitioners working in the field. Coverage includes restraints on information gathering and publication, privacy, defamation, copyright, broadcast and cable regulations, access, electronic media, indecency, obscenity and pornography, media censorship, freedom of information and public rights to access, advertising and consumer regulations.

This course will trace to process that takes manuscript from final draft publication. Topics covered will include copy editing, proof reading, fitting copy, working with authors, making editorial decisions and developing skills in critical reading. The course will also explore visual concepts that increase communication effectiveness through the printed word. The importance of selecting and co-ordinating format, layout, typography and illustrations is stressed.

This course provides students with the skills in the art of writing and techniques of good writing for the media. There will be an intensive component of writing to help the students communicate more effectively through the medium of the printed word and extensive out of class assignments or writing for a variety of communication media. There will also be a study of the elements that make news, sources of news, interviewing, writing style and structure, press problems and press-society relations.

This course explores the nature of communication research and the place of qualitative and quantitative methods in that research. Emphasis will be understanding rationale for survey, textual, experimental, ethnographic, historical and descriptive research methods. It also provides an examination of procedures, strategies and assumptions associated with particular techniques of design and measurement, data collection, data preparation, data analysis and hypothesis testing and the writing of the final report.

This course presents theoretical models for conceptualizing audiences, mass media messages and reception of messages in communication. It also examines the psychological and social character of audience experience by using models that analyse the uses and gratifications of mass media. Other topics include reception theory and studies of audiences as interpretive communities.

This course explores the importance of customer service to an organisation’s success or overall business output. It helps students understand the need for creating and sustaining standards of excellent customer service in business operation for all kinds of organisations whether government or private.  It also explores effective ways of developing and motivating employees and measuring service levels. It also examines how delivering customer service transforms organisations from ordinary to extra ordinary.

This course introduces the history, purpose, channels, content, technologies, policy, and regulation of international communications systems. Issues covered include: differences in media infrastructure between nations and regions; international trends in the development, appropriation and governance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media industries; patterns in international news, entertainment and information flows, and the emergence of global communication in historical perspective.

This introductory course, designed for career changers and those new to public relations, details the ideas, skills, and principles that underlie the public relations craft. Students in this class study the role and contributions of public relations practitioners in contemporary society, learn about potential legal and ethical aspects of the practice of public relations, study the communication process and how persuasion is used with various audiences, and learn how to develop a strategic communication plan to achieve specific goals and objectives.