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Classes are designed to challenge your thinking and develop your professional skills. You’ll leave each class with a unique set of tools to approach new communications challenges.

Tailor your experience to your career goals by focusing on one of eight areas of specialization. Use the search widget below to sort classes by quarter, specialization, instructor and degree track for each quarter. Get a comprehensive view of the full academic year in our Course Guide.

View the University of Washington Academic Calendar for important dates, including quarter start and end dates, registration dates and deadlines, and campus holidays.

Registration numbers (SLNs) are located on the Time Schedule. Please read the Department’s statement on internet resource requirements for access to courses.

COMMLD 582: Communicating Trust and Credibility for Emerging Technologies

(

Lohmann

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 9/30 – 12/2, 9:00am – 1:00pm | Online
SLN:

Course Description:

This course introduces students to the art of honestly advocating for emerging technologies such as AI, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things. It provides a foundation to ensure students understand how to effectively inform stakeholders that these solutions are both useful, safe and align with values that prioritize the good of the community as a whole. Yet, there is a fine line between storytelling and propaganda, especially when it comes to making the case around these powerful innovations. What are the ethics of effective advocacy? How do we most effectively champion appropriate technologies to our employees, customers, clients, or constituents? We will also examine questions about the platforms and technology themselves: What reference should we use to recognize that emerging technologies are serving as trustful conduits? By learning how to critically think about such questions, students will learn how to communicate clearly and ethically in favor of the use of nascent technology solutions that might impact an organization or community.

Meets Law & Ethics Requirement.

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COMMLD 525: Brand Values

(

Howard

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 9/24 – 12/3, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 230
SLN: 13017

Course Description:

This course will take a close up look at corporate brand values in marketing communications today. Brand values should be timeless and unchanging, but in a constantly fluctuating business environment, is this goal even possible? While high volume video advertising and A/B testing is exploding, paradoxically, messaging of corporate brand values is oftentimes minimized. Marketing today is composed of ever-changing algorithms, transactional communications, and confusing narratives. Should creativity play a bigger role in storytelling in today’s marketplace? Do customers even know what the companies they make purchases from actually stand for values-wise? Does it matter? How can companies still connect emotionally with consumers? Students will ideate a marketing film for a company or nonprofit of their choice. All the while, they’ll be considering deeply how emotion, story, and marketing message function in a project that resonates with the consumer while also reinforcing an organization’s belief system.

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COMMLD 563: Multicultural Marketing: Creating Equitable and Inclusive Communications

(

Park

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Saturdays 10/4, 10/18, 11/01, 11/15, 12/06, 9:00am – 5:00pm | Online
Registration SLN: 13031

Course Description

This course will take a close look at the evolution of multicultural marketing, industry best practices and foundational strategies related to multicultural communications. We will explore how agencies and companies have adapted, pivoted and transformed the way brands and organizations engage with diverse audiences. You’ll learn how to build marketing campaigns that are rooted in principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. Additionally, we’ll learn how to craft campaigns that are responsive to the increasingly diverse marketplace and ever-changing marketing landscape.

Meets Law & Ethics Requirement.

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COMMLD 558: Law & Policy

(

Baker

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 9/30 – 12/9, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | DEN 258
Registration SLN: 13029

Course Description

This course looks at how the law of digital media, interactive media and social media has facilitated the growth of multimedia storytelling, interactivity, and the explosion of collaborative consumption. Understanding when and how one can remix, reuse, republish, and remake content is critical to any organization’s successful advertising, content creation, distribution, and publication. This course will explore the legal issues surrounding free expression, content production and publication, intellectual property (with a special emphasis on copyright and fair use), and advertising. This course is designed both as a stand-alone course to satisfy the law and policy requirement of the program and as a companion to the data security and privacy law course offered in the Spring, which focuses more on data usage, privacy and security, FTC regulatory issues and intellectual property issues around data and analytics.

Kraig Baker’s humorous and comprehensive lecturing style, complete with the latest trend examples, helped me demystify the law and make it less of a “black box.” I gained a framework to assess and manage legal, ethical, and structural risks, tools to determine if I had a legal issue and insights on whether I needed a lawyer and how to communicate these legal issues effectively.—Aster Li, MCDM alum cohort ‘22 alumni

Meets Law & Ethics Requirement.

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COMMLD 544A/B: Professional Short-Form Writing

(

Shaban

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | Meets Professional Writing Requirement | 3 or 5 Credits
Wednesdays 9/24 – 12/3, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 126
3-credit 544A Registration SLN: 13025
5-credit 544B Registration SLN: 23358

Course Description

This collaborative hands-on course explores the kind of short-form writing that dominates today’s rapidly evolving professional communications space — the digital space where lines between content and form increasingly blur and where always-on media feeds deliver a mix of advertising, marketing, public relations, human resources, personal brand-building and journalistic reporting and research. It’s a space that presents new writing challenges every day: professional emails, office memos, newsletters, website copy, funding proposals, executive summaries, op-eds, tweets, blurbs, blogs. Much of this material is badly done. Most of it is mediocre. The best of it, though, sings out and demands our attention, demonstrating mastery in the kind of critical thinking and dedicated practice that delivers copy sharply focused and sure in matching voice and material with form and audience. This course is part professional-communications criticism class and part writing workshop. It’s about learning how to identify good writing; it’s about understanding the process that produces good writing; and it’s about practicing that process yourself.

Students can choose between a 3-credit and 5 credit option:

• Section A will be 3 Credits and meet the Professional Writing Requirement. It meets 6-8:20. 

• Section B will be 5 Credits and also meet the Professional Writing Requirement. It will meet for a longer period from 6-9:50 and include additional short form assignments over the course of the quarter. 

Meets Professional Writing Requirement.

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COMMLD 541: Crisis Communication

(

Visneski

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 9/24 – 12/3, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | Online
Registration SLN: 13024

Course Description:

Nothing is more dramatic than a crisis. When an organization, company, industry, or individual in the public eye is in a crisis, communication is one of the crucial routes back to normalcy. Oftentimes, organizations find themselves unprepared when a crisis hits and only then think “Oh goodness, we should get a crisis communications plan in place!” Trying to “spin” a bad situation can both be unethical, and ineffective, damaging reputation, and subsequently business.

This course will teach you how to be rapidly responsive, responsible, and to avoid common pitfalls in crisis comms. We will examine how organizations attempt to anticipate and recover from crises, how the broadcast and print media cover different types of crises, how crisis communications fails, and how it succeeds.

Meets Law and Ethics Requirement.

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COMMLD 540A: The Power of Revision

(

Baltus

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | Meets Professional Writing Requirement | 3 Credits
Mondays 9/29 – 12/1, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | CMU 242
Registration SLN: 13023

Course Description

No matter what kind of writing you do, editing skills are essential to producing your best work. In this course, experienced writers will learn a rigorous, methodical approach to revision that transforms a rough draft into a compelling finished piece. You’ll gain the awareness and control you need to diagnose and address problems, develop ideas and themes, create structure, and craft a story. You’ll also hone your ability at the line level, learning ways to make your writing clearer and more precise by eliminating clichés, clunky phrases, and extraneous words. As an editing workshop, this course emphasizes the importance of giving and receiving kind, productive feedback. It focuses on longer-form texts for public audiences, such as blog posts, executive op-eds, and news releases, though its principles are applicable to all forms of writing and creative iteration.

Editing IS Writing! Leah Baltus approaches her craft with precision and clarity, and her mission is to pass on her knowledge to students in a highly structured way, with loads of productive feedback. Several students from this class have had their work published in professional/ trade outlets. If you want a surefire way to improve your writing effectiveness, this class is for you!–Gretchen Ludwig, Associate Director

Meets Professional Writing Requirement.

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COMMLD 535: Foundations of Audio Storytelling (e.g. Podcasting)

(

Partnow

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 9/30 – 12/2, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | Room TBD
Registration SLN: 13021

Course Description

The podcasting industry has surged in recent years, with podcasts also becoming an increasingly important part of marketing and communication campaigns. Since it is the only medium that audiences can consume while engaged in a multitude of other activities, audio storytelling has a unique advantage to inform, entertain and call to action.

This course will teach you how to use audio to tell a powerful story. You will learn how to create your own short sound-rich, nonfiction audio story driven by characters and scenes. You will move through the process of research, reporting, interviewing, writing, editing, and mixing an audio story, as well as pitching a story for radio or podcast. By the end of the class you will have a working knowledge of the basics of audio storytelling and production. You will feel more confident about how to support visual storytelling with audio, as well as how to work with a larger production team on audio projects.

This course is a good match for students who:

• Are seeking an individualized, project-based course

• Want foundational storytelling and editing skills that can translate into any medium

• Would like to learn how audio can elevate and transform storytelling

This class greatly elevated my ability to concisely tell stories!—Jacob Christensen, Foundations of Video and Advanced Video Practicum Instructor, and MCDM cohort ‘15 alumni

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COMMLD 531: Foundations of Video Storytelling

(

Christensen

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 9/30 – 12/2, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 302
Registration SLN: 13019

Course Description

Approximately 183 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Video isn’t the future of marketing, the revolution is already here and how brands leverage that storytelling capability sets them apart from the competition.

Whether you want to create video content as a full time job or you want to have the skill set in your back pocket as you navigate your communications career, this class will provide a strong foundation for maximizing video content in your marketing endeavors.

We will go over basics of how to use cameras but we will also talk about why content is successful and how we can best emulate those formulas. You are expected to exercise the craft of content creation while at the same time critically evaluating and deconstructing content you see in the marketplace.

This course is a good match for students who:

• Want to work in marketing and have a foundational knowledge of how compelling video content is created

• Want to specialize in video content creation long term

• Are prepared for a time consuming and rigorous learning experience

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COMMLD 530A: Storytelling with Data

(

Mcghee

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 9/24 – 12/3, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 302
Registration SLN: 13018

Course Description:

This course teaches students to assemble visual evidence in service of a narrative story. It reflects the new reality that information graphics, maps, and data visualizations are no longer a supplement to text stories created by dedicated service desks, but are free-standing items produced by cross-disciplinary journalists with skills in data reporting and visual presentation.

This course leads students through the process of reporting, analyzing, and presenting a data-driven infographic feature story. Students will explore the gamut of influential and impactful visual stories: an explainer on Covid-19 transmission (the Washington Post’s most popular story of all time); articles exploring California wildfires and street protests in Hong Kong; and stories exploring larger historical and cultural themes like the rise of Confederate statues and such cultural questions as: why are women’s pants pockets so small and K-pop bands so big?

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COMMLD 523: Foundations of Social Media Communications & Strategy

(

Tang

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Saturdays 10/4, 10/18, 11/01, 11/15, 12/06, 9:00am – 5:00pm | Online
Registration SLN: 13015

Course Description

Communication on digital platforms and networks will be the forever norm of our society and human experience. In this course, we will learn, practice and investigate the fundamental principles of communication through social media. We’ll identify strategies used by social media platforms to maximize their key metrics and apply them to business metrics that brands and organizations use to fulfill their objectives and goals. At the end of this course, you’ll be able to identify areas of opportunity on social media platforms to create interesting campaigns, analyze emerging social trends to stay ahead of the curve, and use the tools and best practices of the world’s most powerful brands to engage audiences.

This course is a good match for students who:

• Have a keen interest in social media

• Want to learn about effective social media strategies

• Are using social media for their professional work and personal branding

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COMMLD 522: The Future of Marketing

(

Salkowitz

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 9/30 – 12/9, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 126
Registration SLN: 13014

Course Description

Rapid evolution of digital media and technology continues to disrupt the business of marketing, making it essential for professionals in the field to keep abreast of trends in a number of areas. This class focuses on the technologies shaping marketing, advertising, media, public relations and communications in the 2-4 year horizon and explores strategies of successful marketing organizations, both digital and traditional.

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COMMLD 520A: Principles of Marketing

(

Meyer

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

Track Neutral | 5 Credits
Mondays 9/29 – 12/1, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 126
Registration SLN: 13013

Course Description

This course is designed to provide you with an understanding of foundational marketing concepts and their application within business and non-business organizations. We start with an overview of marketing strategy, including strategic goal setting and planning and assessment of the market environment (company customers, and competitors), and then review fundamental elements of the marketing mix – product, price, placement (distribution) and promotion. We’ll go deeper into marketing communications, including product/service launches, branding, and integrated campaigns. We will explore all this through a dynamic mix of lectures, case studies, guest speakers, videos, in-class discussions, and individual and group projects.

At the end of the course, you will know how to develop a marketing plan, including how to perform market segmentation, targeting, and positioning; implement branding concepts; execute market research tools and techniques; analyze consumer/audience behavior, introduce new products or services, and develop advertising and integrated communications campaigns.

This class is a good match for students who:

• Want a foundational understanding of how marketing strategies and tools function in the world of business and organizations

• Plan to pursue marketing roles within organizations not limited to communication or creative

• Want to learn to create a portfolio-level marketing plan for an actual client

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COMMLD 517: The Psychology of User Experience

(

Haverly

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 9/24 – 12/3, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | Online
Registration SLN: 13012

Course Description

Designers, product marketers, and entrepreneurs will learn the psychological constrictions of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social influence that determine whether or not customers will be receptive to their digital innovations. Students will learn how to identify, apply theory, and develop consulting or research recommendations based on psychological theory. They’ll unpack the psychological processes determining users’ perception of, engagement with, and recommendation of digital innovations, and gain a broader understanding of the human context of digital ventures, including the ethical differences between alignment and meeting needs vs. exploitation and unsustainable design approaches. This will give their innovations an edge on what are increasingly competitive platforms such as apps, bots, in-car apps, AI and augmented reality content).

This class is a good match for students who:

• Have little or no previous experience understanding human psychological theory and various applications that impact design for human engagement

• Want to design ethical systems that do not take advantage of the psychological motivations of users

• Are keen on developing their research skills by working on a portfolio piece as their final project

Meets Research Methods Requirement

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COMMLD 512: User Research & UX Strategies

(

Levine

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Mondays 9/29 – 12/1, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 104
Registration SLN: 13010

Course Description

This course focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of user interfaces from a usability perspective. The aim of the class is to study the concepts, methods, and techniques of usability engineering, with a focus on the artifacts where user experience is essential. Historically, usability has covered aspects of efficiency, learnability, and ease of use. Today, a large number of other measures for success rely on elements such as playability, engagement, entertainment, immersion, and aesthetics.

The above concepts will be detailed with the expectation that by the end of the quarter, students will recognize the aspects of each of the following deliverables within Interface Design and User Research. At the completion of this course, students will have portfolio-ready, end-to-end work examples. The work examples are designed for students to demonstrate they can: understand basic principles of user interface design, implementation, and evaluation, design and conduct usability studies, select an appropriate evaluation method and articulate its advantages and disadvantages, establish useful test objectives, and prepare reports and presenting results.

Meets Research Methods Requirement.

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COMMLD 511: Intro to User Centered Design

(

Gordon

)

- 2025-2026 | Autumn 2025

MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Mondays 9/29 – 12/1, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | DEN 258
Registration SLN: 13009

Course Description

This course focuses on the fundamentals of user experience design, identifying the skills and concepts needed to successfully design products and services for humans. We will learn the principles of design thinking so that students come away from the class with a framework for understanding how to identify real user problems, design solutions for how to solve those problems, and then test those solutions with real people.

Meets Research Methods Requirement

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© Copyright 2025 Department of Communication. University of Washington

© Copyright 2025 Department of Communication. University of Washington