Courses
Winter Session courses on the New Brunswick campus meet or exceed the high academic standards set for the regular academic year at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, a top-ranked research institution and public university. Courses are selected for their suitability and approved by the school dean and/or faculty curricular committee.
View All Winter Session Courses
Instructor(s): Richard DoolExpand
Nothing tests a leader’s communication competency more than a crisis. We are living through a vivid, live leadership laboratory where we are witnessing those leaders who are seizing the moment and others who unfortunately have not. There has never been a time in our history with so much scrutiny driven by the rise of social media and the multiplicity of outlets. In the Chinese language, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters, one representing danger and the other, opportunity. Leaders need to seize this moment and acknowledge the crisis while also painting a picture of life after the crisis and how we can deploy any lessons learned. In this synchronous course, students will learn about the competencies and practices that need to be effective as a leader in a crisis.
Dr. Dool has a MA in Strategic Communication and Leadership, a MS in Management and a Doctorate in Management/Organizational Processes. He is an active researcher and presenter in these areas and has published on the concepts of Change FatigueTM and LeaderocityTM. He is the author of “Enervative Change: The Impact of Persistent Change Initiatives on Job Satisfaction,” “How Generation Z Wants to be Led” and “12 Months of Leadership Insights.” Before Dr. Dool decided to pivot and pay it forward in academia full time, he had an extensive, and diverse corporate executive career. His executive experience includes leading an $800M division of AT&T, global leadership roles (GE), and serving for 12 years as CEO of both public and private companies.
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Instructor(s): John PavlikExpand
This asynchronous course will teach students about the use of experimental new media tools to transform news reporting, media storytelling, and other media processes. These include augmented reality, e-reader technology, 360-degree cameras, immersive media, the Mobile Journalist Workstation, 3D imaging and audio, 3D printing, interactive video, video as input, geo-tagged content, animation, and news. Students will learn how emerging new media tools are applied to journalism and media to create and test new story formats that in an analog world would be impossible, but in a digital, networked world can engage individuals across time and space, provide much-needed context and customization, in-depth, context-sensitive news and mediated entertainment.
The instructor, John Pavlik, has written extensively how the impact of newer technologies on media. He has been at the forefront of looking into the development of tools that were once considered impossible and are now part of our everyday lives.
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Instructor(s): Amy JordanExpand
From smartphones to social media to legacy media, our lives revolve around the various outlets and information pipelines that dominate our personal and interconnected worlds. Understanding this dynamic will better inform students about the role media play in our society, our interactions, and our world. Each year digital, telecommunication, and print-related media corporations spend billions of dollars keeping current with trends in public opinion and taste in an effort to attract ever-larger audiences.
The course will meet asynchronously which will offer students the flexibility to learn the material at their own pace during the Winter Break. This will provide students with added opportunities to review the lectures multiple times and afford them the chance to better understand the information. This Core Curriculum course will give students a better understanding of these forces trying to impact them.
Amy Jordan studies the role of media in the lives of children and families. She is currently co-editor of the Journal of Children and Media (with Dafna Lemish) and past president of the International Communication Association (2015-2016). Jordan serves on the Board of Trustees of Sesame Workshop, the non-profit organization behind Sesame Street, and is chair of the Education Committee. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is also the Chairperson of the Rutgers University Department of Journalism and Media Studies.
It is a Core Curriculum course that satisfies Historical Analysis (HST) – k and the course required to apply to become a Journalism and Media Studies major.
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This online course emphasizes significant stylistic movements across time and place. This course lays the groundwork for more advanced art history courses by introducing visual analysis and other interpretative tools of art historical research. Students will also learn how the visual products of a culture relate to historical circumstances, societal values, and shifting personal and collective identities. The skills developed in this class provide important tools for navigating and interpreting media and visual representation in the 21st century.
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Instructor(s): Mark BealExpand
This asynchronous course focuses on the most important topics now and over the next several years in the public relations industry: marketing with purpose during the era of a global pandemic and racial injustice. Every company, brand, and public relations agency is being challenged to be purposeful in their communication and public relations as it relates to these critical topics. This course will offer students an immersion in the most critical issues in public relations using a real-time, real-world approach. Students will interact with leaders in the public relations industry who are on the front line of developing purposeful communication strategies in response to COVID-19 and racial injustice. The real-world content of this course will be immediately applicable to the public relations, marketing, and communication fields.
The instructor, Mark Beal, has spent the last 30 years immersed in the public relations industry-leading one of the top-ranked public relations agencies and working with Fortune 100 companies, the same agencies and companies who are attempting to address these important topics now. The instructor continues to be actively engaged with these agencies and companies as they develop their purposeful communication and action.
This course counts as an elective for the Master of Communication and Media graduate program at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information.
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Instructor(s): Jonathon AppelsExpand
Keep warm this winter and try something new with this asynchronous course! Students will study differing world religions in their commitment to dance and movement rituals, as well as the relationship of the body to movement sensation. Through this course, students will sense the mystical within the body configurations inherent in music-making, painting, sculpture, theatre, sports, yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, gym and body training cultures, etc. We explore the sacred nature of the current club dancing scene, as we also appreciate the spiritual nature of your own individual dance expression! Students will be guided to their own movement experiences, whether as audience members or participants in brief movement exercises both athletic and relaxed (optional). Online discussion groups are combined with performance field trips (virtual or socially distanced) of the student's choice.
Professor Appels is both a choreographer and an academic. His dance company has toured twenty countries on three continents. He marvels at the movement expression and personal agility of everyone at all times! When club dancing is possible (before and after COVID) he is as likely to be found on the dance floor, as he is to be found at a dance recital, a dance class, athletic fields, and gyms, or in the classroom at Rutgers!
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Instructor(s): Alessandra ValentinExpand
This online course explores how categories of difference such as race, gender, sexuality, class, size and disability produce some people as human and others as less than human within film and society. By analyzing the representational politics of horror films, we will understand how society sees difference as monstrous and as a means of legitimizing the oppression and elimination of those framed as “other.” Who we fear as a society (and as individuals) is dependent on structural power dynamics and discourses of normalcy that produce “others” as deviant. Our fears are shaped and reshaped through the genre of horror where filmmakers and audiences work out cultural anxieties together.
Over the course of the semester, students will be able to:
- Effectively identify how horror movies mobilize normative conceptions of gender, racial and sexual difference as well as subvert those norms
- Analyze how the categories of difference shape the lived experiences of marginalized people on both individual and societal levels, in local and global contexts
- Explain how power dynamics are at play in the contexts of culture, society, politics, economics and technology as well as the role that they play in naturalizing hierarchies of difference and perpetuating stereotypes
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