This course offers a survey of the variety of theories and issues in communication in a systematic fashion and from a historical perspective, with a focus on those theories and issues that bear strong implications for the present situations of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China.

This course seeks to:

-- Establish a coherent understanding of the progressive development of the discipline of communication;

-- Provide a context for critical appreciation of current scholarship and research in communication;

-- Offer a reasonable account of future conditions for human communication.

This course explores the relationship between the media and society. It is organized by an analytical framework that examines the media from textual, institutional, medium, and audience approaches. Various theoretical perspectives, such as critical studies, social constructionism, medium theory, and cultural studies will be introduced to examine the interaction between the media and society. The course aims at not only enhancing students’ theoretical understanding about the course topics but also cultivating their skills of analysing media influence in social life.

This course is intended to be a lab where students can execute their critical thinking and creative abilities in exploring the world of mass communication research. While the main purpose is to expose students to the fundamentals of social scientific research methods and to familiarize them with a variety of research techniques in mass communication research that are useful to media professionals (e.g., surveys, experiments, content analyses), students will also be required to critically evaluate published research articles and creatively design their own research project.

In this course, students will learn about interactive media communication in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary perspective. The focus will be on the sociocultural, political, economic and technological contexts and aspects of interactive media. The course will cover many case studies of interactive media, such as games, mobile interfaces, and interactive art. They will learn about the psychological effects of media, politics and economics embedded in interactive media structures, philosophy in interactive media communication, and the historical development of as well as potential futures of interactive media. The course will equip students to engage with interactive media critically and develop a nuanced in-depth understanding of interactive media communication in a larger sociocultural context.

This project-orientated course aims to integrate knowledge and skills interactive media design, and with a focus of design thinking and media product deployment. It will explain the influence of technologies on media industry and social changes. The objective of the project is to enable students to carry out a piece of independent project which could be advanced data analytics and/or visualization project on user insights, or a case study evaluating concepts of an interactive media product and testing of the concepts. The output of this course includes, but not limited to, data-driven user research report, data visualizations, data-driven business analysis, or a product prototype.

This course aims to equip students with the principles and skills to develop interactive media communication with dramatic and emotional impacts. The students will learn to create an idea, communicate the idea efficiently with visual language, and develop and visualize the concept with design documents, flowcharts and storyboards. The focus of the course will be on developing a product concept and transform it into a working design document with clear descriptions, level design, and key art storyboards. By the end of the course, students will be able to present their product ideas vividly, primarily through visual means.

This course aims to equip communication professionals with the interdisciplinary knowledge of interactive media economy. It combines knowledge of finance, technology, and media. The course will cover basic understandings of blockchain technology, its opportunities, its limitations and how it can be applied to interactive media businesses. The course will integrate theoretical and practical approaches, and culminate with the production of a creative project on a blockchain platform.

This course aims to extend students' visual literacy and application of creative ideas from static medium to dynamic interactive media with the introduction of programming skills and the relationship between codes and visual elements. In order the harness the full potentials of the emerging dynamic media, a thorough understanding of the general programming principles and interactivity design is indispensable. However, this course is not going to train students as programmers but prepare them with sufficient knowledge to develop and exploit the dynamic media for their creative endeavours. Students will learn the underlying mechanisms of manipulating, creating and transforming visual elements using programming codes. Moreover, students will explore the domain of generative visuals and arts through the evolutional computing concepts of iterations, recursion, random function and L-system. After finishing this course, students will be able to develop dynamic and generative visual applications for various domains of creative and media productions.

This course aims to discover and examine how individuals interact with media from a psychological perspective. Through exploring (1) media users’ motivations, (2) cognitive and affective processing of media contents, as well as (3) media effects, this course provides students with an overview of both the theories and methods in the field. In addition, students will design and conduct a media psychology study, and apply their findings to solve real-life issues. Topics such as human-computer interactions (HCI) and user experience (UX) will also be covered.

Data mining is a significant method for media data acquisition, analysis and management. This course aims to introduce the fundamental issues of media and data mining; to learn the latest techniques of data mining; to conduct application case studies to show the usage of data mining for media analytics. A variety of practical application in media and communication are included, such as social media analysis and social network analysis.

This course aims to cover key concepts, technologies and skills in Web and programming design such as Python, R, JavaScript, server-side scripting language, database connectivity and session management. After the completion of this course, students will be able to develop Web and social media with dynamic and interactive contents to better understand artificial intelligence’s background and future developments such as data visualization and machine learning.

The course introduces students to the fundamental knowledge of AI to develop interactive media, especially games, with intelligent non-player characters for an engaging gameplay. Different types of AI algorithms in the context of game design such as movement, decisionmaking, pathfinding, and tactical and strategy AI will be covered. Moreover, students will learn the application of AI in procedural content creation such as landscape and maze generations. After finishing the course, students will be able to enrich the gameplay and overall design with AI-based agents which behave intelligently in response to the players’ dynamic interactions.

The social effects of interactive media have been long debated. This course discusses various ethical and bioethical themes in interactive media narratives, exploring issues as well as potentialities in and around interactive media communication.

This course is designed for students to learn and acquire the knowledge of narrative strategies and cultural economics in relation with worldwide creative media industry. This subject will introduce the basic understanding of the online business models and the foundation of communication design entities and to the management concepts, which are specific to the process of communication design. Students will be able to identify and apply media economy to creative endeavors. They will develop an understanding of creative people as resources and individual talents in different commercial sectors and learn the strategic skills of project management and problem solving. In class, students will need to learn and understand the genuine practices of creative industry. Study of departmental works and role-play of operating a mobile and web creative company will be introduced. Students will eventually understand the business strategies and opportunities in the real world and what is necessary for a better creative media management.

This course aims to provide a framework for students to understand the skills and knowledge needed for the strategic planning of communication campaigns by integrating various elements in public relations, advertising and social media. The objective is to develop students’ capability to execute communication campaigns by working with professionals of different roles and functions in the industry.

The course aims to help students understand the managerial and decision-making processes of advertising. Its objective is to develop students’ ability to analyse market and competitive environments, and to develop and present advertising solutions. The application of theories to analyse China and Hong Kong market situations will be emphasized.

This course provides instruction and writing practice designed to develop the professionallevel writing skills expected of public relations practitioners, emphasizing the multimedia approaches required for different audiences and media.” This class will consist of an introductory section where we will “talk about writing”, followed by a practical section where we will simply write.

This course will examine the role of strategic communication in crisis management. Important concepts of strategic management of public relations, issues management, risk communication, activism, crisis communication principles and crisis communication in the digital era will be covered. Different types of crisis ranging from natural disasters to human or organizational failure will be discussed. Students will learn the principles in designing and implementing a crisis communication plan using various media platforms. Local and overseas cases will be incorporated to demonstrate the most effective communication to different stakeholder groups in crisis situations.

This course studies how an understanding of consumer behaviour informs the development and implementation of communication campaigns in Hong Kong and Asia. It examines the consumer decision-making process and how it varies for different types of purchases; the psychological processes involved, including the consumer learning process; and external factors such as culture, social class, group influences and situational determinants. Global consumer issues including the effects of social networks and consumer activism on companies’ communication strategies will be examined. Application of current theories and research findings in cross-cultural consumer studies will be emphasized.

The advent of social media and mobile media devices, such as smartphones and tablets, is rapidly changing human interaction, including business models. Millions of people worldwide are living much of their lives on SNS, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blog, YouTube and LinkedIn in the United States, and Renren, Weibo in China. Global Internet users spent more than one fifth of online time on social network sites or blogs. The trend exemplifies that human interaction, including business environment, has being deeply transformed by social media.

This course seeks to address the following four key questions:

1 What are social media, and how do they transform business models?

2 What platforms and opportunities do social media provide for business, big or small?

3 How to analyse and develop social media marketing strategies?

4 How to cultivate yourself to become a social media researcher and strategist?

The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with the practical applications and the theoretical implications of social media-related technologies. The course is grounded in practice, and students will be required to participate in social networks, forums, Facebook, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. We will examine their economic, social, and cultural implications, and cover some of the latest developments in the social media area. We will also explore techniques for collecting and analysing social media data.

This course will introduce students to the field of data visualization. Students will 1) learn basic visualization design and evaluation principles, 2) be tutored on how to find and download datasets of interests, and 3) develop programming skills to create a good variety of common charts for effective data exploration and visualization. By the end of the semester, students are expected to become educated critiques of data visualization, explore and visualize large datasets. They will also become familiar with the self-learning resources on R to continue to sharpen their skills beyond this course.

This course aims to introduce the fundamental knowledge and hands-on skills of big data analytics in the field of media and communication. Special focus will be placed on techniques for searching, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and visualizing data. Technical details include, but not limited to, web crawling, data storage, data analysis, text mining, social network analysis, and data visualization, based on open source software packages. Through a variety of teaching learning activities, such as class demonstrations, individual exercises, quizzes, collaborative projects, and guest lectures, by the end of the semester, students are expected to become capable to collect big data from different data sources, i.e., social media harvesting, web scraping, online archiving or indexing data retrieving, with open source software packages. Students are also expected to produce socially, culturally, or commercially meaningful data-driven narrative outputs, such as data-driven journalistic report, data visualization, data-driven business analysis, and computational social science research reports. Meanwhile, critical reflection on the overuse and abuse of big data and relevant ethical and legal controversies will be discussed throughout the semester as well.

The new media design meets the growing demand with strong visual design and technical knowledge to create the interactive user experiences for mobile apps, entertainment, gaming, digital products, education, and technology industries. New media design is at the intersection of visual communication, design strategy, technology sciences, and user experience design. Integrated with communication and interaction, new media design focuses on creating engaging interfaces with well thought out behaviours. Understanding how users and technology communicate with each other is fundamental to this field. With this understanding, you can anticipate how someone might interact with the system, fix problems early, as well as invent new ways of doing things.

Thus, the aims of this course include teaching students the required design (e.g., user interface design and user experience design), prototype creating, usability research, and students will also be taught critical thinking and analysis skills to understand how well designed new media, in reverse, affect human communication and interaction. At the end of the semester, students will create dynamic and interactive projects (mobile app prototypes) by they own. This course positions the students for a broader scope of career in interactive, and user experience design for the digital marketing, mobile, entertainment and corporate design.

Communication Research Thesis

Media Convergence: Theory and Practice

Advanced Quantitative Communication Research Methods

Deception is an extremely common propagation phenomenon in life. The common sense of life tells us that it is extremely common, the moral code tells us that it is not worthy of encouragement, and as ordinary people, although we see the deceitful people with contempt, we inevitably have a little awe. Have you ever thought about the value and significance of such a seemingly ordinary and almost common sense concept in our daily communication process? This course focuses on guiding and stimulating students' interest, and analyzes the formation process, motivation and evidence of deception in various human interaction situations. By sharing and discussing key concept theories, research results, behavioral ethics and case studies, students can gradually form their own views on lies and deceit, truth and knowledge. Therefore, when encountering deception in daily life and media consumption, it can conduct independent in-depth analysis and think of reasonable solutions.

Communicating Data

Media Communications and Psychology

Privacy, Data Protection, and Surveillance in the Communication and Media Context

Branding

Introduction to Social Science Theories

Qualitative Research Methods

International Advertising

Media Policies and Regulations

Project

New Media Workshop

Organizational Communication

Globalization of Media and Communication

Issues in Intercultural Communication

This course explores the relationship between the media and society. It is organized by an analytical framework that examines the media from textual, institutional, medium, and audience approaches. Various theoretical perspectives, such as critical studies, social constructionism, medium theory, and cultural studies will be introduced to examine the interaction between the media and society. The course aims at not only enhancing students’ theoretical understanding about the course topics but also cultivating their skills of analysing media influence in social life.