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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.

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COMMLD 503 A/B: Practicum in Immersive Experience Design

(

Cioffi

)

- 2023-2024 | Summer 2024

Track Neutral | 2 or 3 credits
Thursdays 6/20 – 8/15, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | CMU 302
2-credit 503A Registration SLN: 10828
3-credit 503B Registration SLN: 14193

Course Description

In this practicum course, students will collaborate with Mental Health Over Dinner and the Seattle Chamber of Connection to advance storytelling projects across various platforms. Through event design, user-generated content strategies, and immersive technologies like XR, students will develop comprehensive story plans to drive client missions forward. They will learn essential skills such as navigating ambiguity, deep listening, and delivering tangible outcomes like storyboards, slide presentations, and execution plans. By the course’s end, students will have honed their storytelling abilities and gained practical experience in real-world project development and collaboration.

Section A will be 2 credits. Section B will be 3 credits.

Credit / No Credit Only.

About 503 Communication and Leadership Practicum

Communication and Leadership Practicum courses give students an opportunity to engage with and understand the uses of course concepts in contemporary professional practice by addressing the challenges of real-life organizations.

Each section of the Comm Lead Practicum focuses on a distinct professional skill or practice that is deemed essential across a variety of professional fields. Students can choose their section based on their interests and needs. Each section is matched with a client organization or group of client organizations who are interested in partnering with Communication Leadership students.

In the span of a quarter, students analyze the issues faced by the client organization(s), collaborate and brainstorm collectively in small teams, and with the support of their faculty mentor create a deliverable for the client organization(s) that relates to the specific practice. Students may also create creative samples as part of the project. In doing so, students can develop and enhance skills, build foundations of practice, and produce work that they can include in their own professional portfolios.

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COMMLD 510A: Persuading Ethical UX Design

(

Evans

)

- 2024-2025 | Winter 2025

MCDM Elective | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 1/7 – 3/11, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | PCAR 297
Registration SLN: 12703

Course Description:

When you are in an ethical debate at work about a product or UX design that clearly focuses on business goals at the expense of customers, the experience can feel very isolating. What can you do?

In this course, you will learn how ethical debates have many moves in common, not unlike a chess game. You will learn moves you can make to stop debates before they start, like responsible setting of KPIs and brainstorming unintended consequences. You will also learn common arguments from folks in business, legal, executive, and product roles and how to counter them. Finally, you will learn all-new moves involving research, brand equity, and the psychology of moral judgments that give Comm Leaders an edge. 

This course is about learning how to do well by doing good. Assignments include weekly 5-slide persuasive decks and a final group-project making a storyboard of a full ethical debate. Readings will alert you to societal issues around Dark patterns in UX design, Privacy and employee surveillance, Socially-responsible marketing and Ethical uses of AI.

This class is a good match for students who:

• have some understanding of the fundamentals of human centric and UX design;

• want to work on a portfolio-level group final project built on the foundations of moral, psychological, and business principals;

• are keen to engage in ethical debates with peers and the instructor

Meets Law & Ethics requirement.

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COMMLD 521: Digital Media Branding & Marketing

(

Mottola

)

- 2024-2025 | Summer 2025

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 6/25-8/20, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | Online
SLN: 10755

Course Description

This course is designed for students who will be utilizing their education and experience in the marketing career tracks or in leadership functions where an understanding of marketing is critical. The focus of the course will be on how to build a brand online or extend a legacy brand digitally by applying marketing fundamentals and examining how the most interesting and dynamic brands operate today. We will simulate brand management and building campaigns for real-world brands and explore how they reach target customers to meet objectives and participate in online culture. While online platforms have offered us many more opportunities and “shiny objects” to reach and communicate with customers, the fundamental marketing skills and theories don’t change much or quickly. Learning to be strategic about how to apply these fundamentals will allow students to remain flexible and relevant.

This class is a good match for students who:

• want to learn to create a portfolio-level brand plan

• want to build expansive, omni-channel marketing strategies and tactics for brand building

• want to develop a CMO view of brand management and building marketing capabilities

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COMMLD 540: Building Teams and Community

(

Baltus

)

- 2020-2021 | Autumn

Track Neutral | 3 Credits
Mondays 10/5-12/7, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | Online

Course Description:

Building meaningful community around your work begins with your team. This course focuses on cultivating community from the inside out, in a series of concentric and overlapping circles. First it addresses ways to bring people together within the workplace and make sure they feel valued through rewarding opportunities to brainstorm, collaborate and critique. Then it explores what it means to set communication norms within an organization and how those norms affect an organization’s culture and identity. Finally, it provides a methodology for deepening connections with external audiences, conducting credible outreach, building load-bearing bridges and inviting widespread engagement that leads to social impact.

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COMMLD 537: Principles of Storytelling for Organizations, Business, and Movements

(

Kessler

)

- 2020-2021 | Winter

Track Neutral Elective | 5 Credits
Saturdays 1/9, 1/23, 2/6, 2/20, 3/6 | 9:00am – 5:00pm | Online

Course Description:

Thinking Story is a foundational class that focuses on the art and craft of nonfiction storytelling to communicate ideas and emotion, build relationships and community, promote change and inspire action. The class reflects the need in all sectors for superb storytelling. The class explores, investigates and discusses the elements of narrative — what makes a story a story – and looks at examples of nonfiction storytelling across media (text, sound, still image, moving image and multimedia combinations). This platform-agnostic, birds-eye view of story is about learning how to reframe/ reconceptualize “information” and “report” as story, how to locate the small story that illuminates the larger issue, and what it takes to produce such work. At its heart, the class is about learning how to conceptualize issues, topics, brands, and ideas as narratives. Students will learn to “think story,” to pinpoint, pitch and gather material for the production of original, compelling and persuasive content.

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COMMLD 533: Storytelling for Emergent Platforms

(

Macklin

)

- 2020-2021 | Spring

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Mondays 3/29-7/9, 6:00PM PST – 9:50PM PST | Online

Course Description:

Emerging models of interactive and immersive (any screen, responsive, virtual & augmented reality) storytelling are disrupting the ways we can reach and engage with our constituents. This course in Emerging Platforms will have a deep concentration on the production aspects and development tools necessary to create immersive (VR / AR) experiences and Snow Fall like web stories. We will be coupling a critical look at these emerging models while working through the technical aspects of story creation and the implementation of media production tools and platforms. This will be a project-based course through which students will acquire the strategy and skills to make informed design, development and use of immersive storytelling processes. Previous multimedia production and web development is not necessary, though a willingness to learn and play with the underlying technologies is a must.

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COMMLD 530 B: Communicating Climate Change

(

Warga

)

- 2021-2022 | Autumn 2021

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Mondays 10/04-12/06, 6:00PM – 9:50PM PDT | DEN 212
Registration SLN: 23403

Course Description

Numbers don’t tell stories—it’s up to effective communicators to make meaning out of the facts for an audience. How do you become a meaning-maker and effective communicator during this slow-crisis? Beyond just communicating the urgency of the situation how do you make sense of it personally in your own career and life?

Students will learn ways of communicating the existing facts of an environmental situation through storytelling. A variety of media will be surveyed (narrative non-fiction, fiction, essays, podcasts, videos, etc) to explore the universal and essential aspects of effective storytelling…along with the highly transferable skills important to your own communication career. Suitable for those wishing to work in NGOs or Environmental organizations. 

Students will pick a topic then challenge themselves to communicate more than just the facts in the medium of their choice as a final deliverable. Strong emphasis will be put on historical factors and how-we-got-here approaches in research and delivery.

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COMMLD 537: Principles of Storytelling for Organizations, Business, and Movements

(

Kessler

)

- 2021-2022 | Winter 2022

Track Neutral Elective | 5 Credits
Saturdays 1/8, 1/22, 2/5, 2/19, 3/5, 9:00AM – 5:00PM | CMU 126 | Hybrid
Registration SLN: 12700

Course Description:

Thinking Story is a foundational class that focuses on the art and craft of nonfiction storytelling to communicate ideas and emotion, build relationships and community, promote change and inspire action. The class reflects the need in all sectors for superb storytelling. The class explores, investigates and discusses the elements of narrative — what makes a story a story – and looks at examples of nonfiction storytelling across media (text, sound, still image, moving image and multimedia combinations). This platform-agnostic, birds-eye view of story is about learning how to reframe/ reconceptualize “information” and “report” as story, how to locate the small story that illuminates the larger issue, and what it takes to produce such work. At its heart, the class is about learning how to conceptualize issues, topics, brands, and ideas as narratives. Students will learn to “think story,” to pinpoint, pitch and gather material for the production of original, compelling and persuasive content.

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COMMLD 511: Introduction to User Centered Design

(

Gordon

)

- 2022-2023 | Winter 2023

MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 1/4 – 3/8, 6:00PM – 9:50PM | CMU 230
Registration SLN: 12775

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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COMMLD 510B: Introduction to Information Architecture

(

Weaver

)

- 2022-2023 | Summer 2023

MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Saturdays 6/24, 7/8, 7/15, 7/22 Online, 8/5 In-Person (with remote option), 9:00AM – 5:00PM | Online
Registration SLN: 10831

Course Description

Information Architecture (IA) helps users understand where they are, what they’ve found, what’s around, and what to expect when they are visiting a website or application. When you have large amounts of information to display, IA can help you create groups, sorting, labels and provide navigation to help people browse your content.This class sets up the basics for organizing content through architecture. We’ll learn about the theory and techniques that help us provide clear paths through content. Through best practices articles, real world examples, and student projects, we’ll explore the foundations and potential of Information Architecture. Students will take on their own mini-project and present their IA discoveries at the end of the session.

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COMMLD 511A: Introduction to User Centered Design

(

Gordon

)

- 2023-2024 | Autumn 2023

MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Mondays 10/2-12/4, 6:00PM – 9:50PM | DEN 113
Registration SLN: 12999

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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COMMLD 510C: User Interface and Visual Design

(

Gordon

)

- 2024-2025 | Winter 2025

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Mondays 1/6 – 3/17, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | DEN 113
Registration SLN: 12704

Course Description

Design encompasses a variety of interconnected concepts. User Interface Design (UI ) is concerned with how navigational components are organized  within a system interface to ensure the layout is intuitive and helps users achieve their goals. Visual Design emphasizes aesthetics and the strategic use of communication elements, such as images, colors, fonts, and other graphic components, to create visually appealing layouts that achieve a business purpose.

Some of the topics we’ll cover are research, mood board creation, testing, user flows, Figma essentials, component libraries, general layout and design, wireframing, prototyping, microcopy, and more. At the end of this course, students will know how to create impactful UI designs and have knowledge of the tools to bring designs to fruition.

This class is a good match for students who:

• want the fundamentals of human perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design;

• want to understand how UI and Visual Design complement each other;

• want to learn the essential steps, tools and knowledge that inform effective UI & Visual Design workflows

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COMMLD 510 B: Introduction UX Writing & Content Design

(

Romero

)

- 2024-2025 | Spring 2025

Track Neutral | Meets Professional Writing Requirement | 3 Credits
Tuesdays 4/1 – 6/3, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | CMU 230
SLN: 12572

Course Description

User Experience (UX) Writing involves the words used in a website, app, or other digital experience flow. The job of UX Writing is to make sure those words help make that experience simple, conversational, and easy to use. This course will use design thinking to guide you through solving complex UX issues using workshops, real-world examples, emerging AI tools and techniques, and creating your own unique UX writing flows and portfolio.

This class is a good match for students who:

• Are planning to pursue a career in the UX and/or marketing field

• want to gain team-based competencies aligned with industry practice

• want to showcase UX writing flows in their UX portfolio

Meets Professional Writing Requirement.

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COMMLD 510B: Introduction to UX Writing & Content Design

(

)

- 2025-2026 | Current Quarter | Winter 2026

Open Elective | Meets Professional Writing Requirement | 3 Credits
Tuesdays, 1/6 – 3/10, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | Room on Time Schedule
Registration SLN: 22024

Course Description

User Experience (UX) Writing involves the words used in a website, app, or other digital experience flow. The job of UX Writing is to make sure those words help make that experience simple, conversational, and easy to use. This course will use design thinking to guide you through solving complex UX issues using workshops, real-world examples, emerging AI tools and techniques, and creating your own unique UX writing flows and portfolio.

This class is a good match for students who:

• want to showcase UX writing flows in their UX portfolio

• are planning to pursue a career in the UX and/or marketing field

• want to gain team-based competencies aligned with industry practice

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COMMLD 540: Distributed and Diverse Teams

(

Chang

)

- 2020-2021 | Autumn

Track Neutral
Saturdays/Sunday, 10/10, 10/11, 10/24, 11/21, 9:00am – 5:00pm | Online

Course Description:

Through this practical and applied course, students will build their leadership and communication effectiveness to work in distributed teams at the global, national, or local levels. With increasing interconnectedness that builds larger and more complex teams and also reduces face/face time of those teams, competencies in distributed leadership are a rapidly evolving must-have set in any professional context but especially in the field of communications. And yet opportunities to sharpen those nuanced skills remain less than optimal. Students will embark on a full-immersion experience by working in distributed teams using a combination of relevant practical materials and readings, ongoing team and individual assignments, personal self-reflection and improved self-awareness and the planning and execution of a class-wise exercise such as a strategy retreat or other learning event. Topics covered will include project planning, goal setting, managing through direct and indirect influence and communicating with impact over the e-highways. Distributed team technology will anchor the students together as they move through coursework that will help them to stretch, struggle, and succeed. By the end of the course, students will be able to not only recognize their progression but will also be able to more effectively articulate the related competencies using terminology and language relevant for professional pursuits. Please note that this course models distributed team leadership in that students will have a weekly distributed leadership team call and work in addition to the 4 on-site classes; this applied approach to the course offers deeper leadership transformation as well as practical skill development.

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COMMLD 534: Visual Storytelling

(

Salkowitz

)

- 2020-2021 | Spring

MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Saturdays 4/3, 4/17, 5/1, 5/15, 5/29, 9:00AM PST – 5:00PM PST | Online

Course Description:

This course will provide you with a solid understanding of the medium of sequential art and visual narrative (aka “comics”) and the practical ability to incorporate visual storytelling into traditional, digital, and transmedia projects in a variety of entertainment, business, education, social and journalistic scenarios. Why comics? Comics and sequential art have gone from the margins of popular culture to the center of a multi-billion dollar global industry and a respected art-form. Many of the most popular movies, television, video games and transmedia projects are adapted from comics and/or depend heavily on storytelling styles that originated with this unique medium. Issues of digital distribution, adaptation and audience engagement that arise in today’s “comics culture” affect the future of publishing, technology, social media and gaming. Beyond the world of entertainment, the principles of visual narrative are becoming fundamental to all manner of storytelling projects, global initiatives and creative enterprises. This class will explore the history and potential of comics as a storytelling medium in the digital age in both media studies and business dimension, incorporating both theory and practice.

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© Copyright 2025 Department of Communication. University of Washington

© Copyright 2025 Department of Communication. University of Washington