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.
(
Romero
)
- 2023-2024 | Spring 2024
Track Neutral | Meets Professional Writing Requirement | 3 Credits
Tuesdays 3/26 – 5/28, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | CMU 230
Registration SLN: 21555
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.
Meets Professional Writing Requirement.
(
Levine
)
- 2024-2025 | Winter 2025
MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 1/8 – 3/12, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 104
Registration SLN: 12707
Course Description
In this class, students will work in small groups to design and prototype innovative user-centered solutions to real-world problems and develop an application. Students will develop their projects from a user experience (UX) design perspective and produce a strong piece for their portfolio.
The course emulates real-life aspects of UX design teams, including in-depth experience with user research, usability testing and iterating on the product with real-life users. By the end of the course, students will construct a map of a product’s full customer journey, develop personas with use cases, design a working prototype, and build a proposal with requirements for the concept.
Prerequisite: COMMLD 511, 512, or 517.
Meets Research Methods Requirement.
(
Graney-Saucke
)
- 2024-2025 | Summer 2025
Track Neutral | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Thursdays 6/26-8/21, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | CMU 126
SLN: 10756
Course Description
Ethics plays a critical role in how we tell stories. What values are behind the story? Who is telling the story, and for whom? What is the intended outcome, and what could the potential impact be? What are the ethics around new media technology like deep fake as we continue to take stories at face value?
Ethics and subjective bias in storytelling can also be complex, and thus they require our attention and reflection in responsible and responsive creative communications. This course will address various storytelling mediums and scenarios where ethics in storytelling are actively at play. Students will engage in critical discourse and assignments to assess values that impact ethical decisions personally and professionally. Assigned media and reading material as well as student sourced case studies will be used in order to ensure diverse and current content. As a conclusion to the class, students will create a final video, audio, web or UX project that engages an ethical challenge.
Meets Law & Ethics requirement.
(
Hall
)
- 2020-2021 | Autumn
Track Neutral | 3 Credits
Mondays 10/5-12/7, 6:00pm – 8:20pm | Online
Course Description:
The world we live in continues to change at an intense rate. In order to succeed in this uncertain future, organizations must adapt to tough market conditions by changing their strategies, their structures and infrastructures, their boundaries, their mindsets, their leadership behaviors and of course their expectations of the people who work within them. The COVID-19 pandemic has shocked the global health care system and the global economy. The Seattle Times reported in April 2020 that the global economy will suffer the worst year since the Great Depression of 1930. There could not be a more critical time to take a course on change management. Key skills taught in this course will prepare a professional for the shifting workforce. Upon completing the course, students will be able to guide organizations to implement change management programs that support employees and reflect organizational culture.
(
Parikh
)
- 2020-2021 | Winter
MCCN Elective | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Thursdays 1/7-3/11 | 6:00pm – 9:50pm | Online
Course Description:
This course is focused on”integrated advocacy,” which is a strategy of communicating one’s advocacy efforts through multiple channels – like the marriage equality movement, net neutrality efforts by Google, Facebook and Netflix, and the passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. You will develop part of an integrated advocacy campaign working for a client in this class. Real-life challenges and advocacy needs of our clients will allow us to use integrated advocacy model in an applied sense. We will build stories around goals and solutions. We will come up with advocacy tactics and create an advocacy campaign that will ignite change. This is a hands-on course. The course will help you develop immersive storytelling skills, and practice community organizing. You will learn persuasive communication and engagement methods, and how to pack a punch with a campaign aimed at making change. Guest speakers and mentors with experience spearheading campaigns will serve as guides throughout the quarter. The course will culminate with a short advocacy pitch session.
(
Chang
)
- 2020-2021 | Spring
Track Neutral Elective | 5 Credits
Saturdays/Sundays 4/10, 4/11, 4/24, 5/23, 9:00AM PST – 5:00PM PST | 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.
(
Wang
)
- 2021-2022 | Summer
MCCN Elective | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Thursdays 6/24-8/19, 6:00PM – 9:50PM PDT | Online
Course Description:
More than any other public health crises in recent memory, the COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes the necessity of effective health, risk and crisis communication. With the pandemic reaching all corners of the globe, no population or industry has been untouched, resulting in many swift and powerful narratives about the consequences of COVID-19. Whether in the midst of a global crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic or enduring more localized health impacts, every day public health information is generated and made available to the public about diseases, public policies, new products, and corporate behavior. People are accessing this information in real time by means of traditional news, online media, social media and word of mouth. The public’s near-instant access to this unfiltered information presents significant new risks, particularly surrounding misinformation, drawing conclusions from wrong or impartial information, and disinformation, deliberately spreading falsehoods to further an agenda. Additional risks include reputation damage for organizations and leaders that are not responding effectively to COVID-19, have negative impacts on health or the environment, or ineffective policy outcomes when health-related guidance is misunderstood or ignored. During times of crisis messaging can be lost in the noise, resulting in unintended consequences, rejected messages, or public fear and confusion.
In this course students will learn about risk communication in public health. Risk communication, a field that emerged in the 1980’s, has been used for both strategic and unplanned communications linked to the introduction of new technologies and products, environmental contamination, disease outbreaks, disasters, consumer products, drug and food safety, safety measures and devices, and new breakthroughs. Events linked to terrorism as well as a number of major natural disasters over the past few years have increased attention to this area. While during non-crisis periods, ineffective risk communication can result in low-impact, wasted resources, and other undesirable outcomes. When deployed effectively, risk communication is an invaluable tool for engendering trust, protecting organizational value, and helping the public make informed decisions. Emphasis in the course is on research and professional practices especially in regards to how to communicate with the general public, special populations, and the news media. The purpose of this course is to provide students with a variety of knowledge and skills they need to interpret risk and crisis communication in public health contexts, develop critical and rigorous thinking capabilities, and design productive and effective risk communication messages that improve communication outcomes, reduce public anxiety, increase trust in organizations and leadership, and help key stakeholders make better decisions.
Meets Law & Ethics requirement.
(
Baker
)
- 2021-2022 | Autumn 2021
MCDM Track | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 10/05-12/07, 6:00PM – 9:50PM PDT | CMU 230
Registration SLN: 23205
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 Fall, which focuses more on data usage, privacy and security, FTC regulatory issues and intellectual property issues around data and analytics.
Meets Law & Ethics Requirement.
(
Williams
)
- 2021-2022 | Winter 2022
MCCN Elective | 5 Credits
Thursdays 1/6 – 3/10, 6:00PM – 9:50PM | Online
Registration SLN: 22074
Course Description:
Workplace culture is dynamic. It’s not about ping-pong tables and unlimited time off. Inclusive and effective culture is critical to how we design the future of work. How we connect and work together impacts everything from how we feel, to our ability to meet the mission of our work. Communication leaders are uniquely situated to effect positive cultural change, no matter the role or the organization. In this course students will learn the “5 components of Inclusive Culture,” a signature framework developed over 15 years of experience helping organizations, startups, small businesses, and emerging companies build inclusive workplaces. Students will learn and apply this step-by-step methodology to build a culture plan for a company of their choice.
(
Graney-Saucke
)
- 2021-2022 | Spring 2022
Track Neutral | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 6:00PM – 9:50PM, 3/30-6/1 | DEN 111 | Partially In-Person
Registration SLN: 21729
Course Description:
Ethics plays a critical role in how we tell stories. What values are behind the story? Who is telling the story, and for whom? What is the intended outcome, and what could the potential impact be? What are the ethics around new media technology like deep fake as we continue to take stories at face value?
Ethics and subjective bias in storytelling can also be complex, and thus they require our attention and reflection in responsible and responsive creative communications. This course will address various storytelling mediums and scenarios where ethics in storytelling are actively at play. Students will engage in critical discourse and assignments to assess values that impact ethical decisions personally and professionally. Assigned media and reading material as well as student sourced case studies will be used in order to ensure diverse and current content. As a conclusion to the class, students will create a final video, audio, web or UX project that engages an ethical challenge.
Instructor: Elliat Graney-Saucke
elliatgs@uw.edu
Elliat Graney-Saucke (she/they) is a white queer femme documentary director/producer, creative sector consultant, industry curator, and educator. While producing media in the US, Germany, Denmark, England, Poland, Serbia, Italy, Spain, Canada, and Israel/Palestine over the span of 20 years, Elliat’s work has focused on marginalized cultural identities. Upon returning from spending the majority of ten years in Berlin, Germany, Elliat served as the first Executive Director of Seattle Documentary Association, organizing industry gatherings involving partnerships with the Wenatchi Tribe and the Washington Film Commission. Seasoned in working with communities and organizational stakeholders internationally, Elliat has produced and curated over 10 culturally specific creative arts festivals and conferences encompassing over 45 nationalities, leading to additional projects like editing the international anthology Innovate Heritage – A Time-Lapse: Contemporary Arts and Heritage in Today’s Society (Springer). Industry and research focus areas include: documentary film industry, storytelling ethics, intangible/tangible and uncomfortable heritage, international diplomacy (UNESCO), creative economy and policy, incarceration, decolonizing the mind, queer/lgbtqai culture and theory, oral history and intergenerational knowledge exchange, and embodied cultural, racial, and geographic equity/justice. Current documentary productions include Boys on the Inside, about three Latinx ‘boys’ who have experienced incarceration in women’s prisons, and Safta, about a holocaust survivor and her close yet complex relationship to her activist granddaughter.
(
)
- 2025-2026 | Current Quarter | Spring 2026
MCDM Elective | Meets Research Methods Requirement | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 4/1 – 6/3, 6:00pm – 9:50pm | Room on Time Schedule
Registration SLN: 12407
Course Description
In the Generative AI UX Studio course, students dive into the dynamic intersection of traditional experience design and artificial intelligence, mastering the tools and frameworks that are reshaping how humans interact with technology. Through intensive hands-on projects, students craft intelligent, adaptive experiences that push beyond conventional interfaces, learning to orchestrate seamless interactions between users and AI agents while maintaining essential human-centered design principles. Students develop expertise in the emerging field of agentic design, creating sophisticated agent personas and behavioral frameworks that define how AI systems perceive, reason, and act on behalf of users – skills that are increasingly crucial in modern digital product development.
Working in collaborative teams that mirror industry practice, students navigate the complex interplay between design, AI capabilities, and user trust, developing working prototypes that demonstrate real-world application of these advanced concepts. Upon completion, students emerge with compelling portfolio pieces that showcase their ability to design next-generation experiences where AI enhances rather than replaces human interaction, positioning them as leaders in this transformative wave of UX innovation.
Meets Research Methods Requirement.
Course Prerequisites: COMMLD 511, 512, or 517.
(
Howard
)
- 2020-2021 | Winter
Track Neutral Elective | 3 Credits
Tuesdays 1/5-3/9 | 6:00pm – 7:50pm | Online
Course Description:
Investor Warren Buffett describes the concept of institutional imperative as “the tendency of executives to mindlessly imitate the behavior of their peers, no matter how foolish it may be to do so.” He added, “I then thought that decent, intelligent and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.”
This unseen force has stifled innovation in businesses while focusing solely on short term financial gains for shareholders only. And covering up for this behavior through dubious communication practices has only complicated things. What role will marketing communication professionals have in expanding companies’ messaging beyond just shareholders going forward? Is change truly afoot, or will there be more of the same?
From the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco to the ever-changing excuses of Facebook to the anti-trust actions against Google, we’ll examine why the communication practices of honesty, trust and admiration will always emerge victorious over institutional imperative. During the quarter we will discuss evolving public and private sector stakeholder communications including, Shareholders, Board Members, and Funders, Communities, Employees, Suppliers, and Customers.”
(
Baker
)
- 2020-2021 | Spring
MCDM Elective | Meets Law & Ethics Requirement | 5 Credits
Tuesdays 3/30-6/1, 6:00PM PST – 9:50PM PST | Online
Course Description:
“Big Data,” “The Internet of Things,” “Behavioral Advertising,” “Analytics” — all buzzwords capturing the explosion of data and the promise of what we can do with data. Collecting, using, organizing, and sharing data and information also evokes legal issues and individual and collective uncertainty over who owns this data, what rights does one own, how does the data usage implicate privacy issues, how is and how should data use be regulated by the government, by private entities, for advertising, etc. This course will explore the legal issues associated with data usage, data collection, sharing of user information, and licensing. This course will pay particular attention to privacy laws in the United States, how the FTC and other regulators are approaching advertisers’ use of personal information, how organizations attempt to keep data secure, and how intellectual property rights protect (and do not protect) data and databases.
(
Howard
)
- 2021-2022 | Winter 2022
Track Neutral Elective | 3 Credits
Tuesdays 1/4 – 3/8, 6:00PM – 8:20PM | CMU 232 | Hybrid
Registration SLN: 12706
Course Description:
Investor Warren Buffett describes the concept of institutional imperative as “the tendency of executives to mindlessly imitate the behavior of their peers, no matter how foolish it may be to do so.” He added, “I then thought that decent, intelligent and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.”
This unseen force has stifled innovation in businesses while focusing solely on short term financial gains for shareholders only. And covering up for this behavior through dubious communication practices has only complicated things. What role will marketing communication professionals have in expanding companies’ messaging beyond just shareholders going forward? Is change truly afoot, or will there be more of the same?
From the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco to the ever-changing excuses of Facebook to the anti-trust actions against Google, we’ll examine why the communication practices of honesty, trust and admiration will always emerge victorious over institutional imperative. During the quarter we will discuss evolving public and private sector stakeholder communications including, Shareholders, Board Members, and Funders, Communities, Employees, Suppliers, and Customers.”
(
Chan
)
- 2021-2022 | Spring 2022
MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Wednesdays 3/30 – 6/1 6:00PM – 9:50PM | CMU 126 | Partially In-Person
Registration SLN: 21478 (application required)
Course Description
Today, the technology that surrounds the “tell” of a story (the modes and channels of communication) directly shape the immersive experience felt by the viewer, while leveraging the lessons of narrative and myth. This course focuses on the decisions we make when we tell our stories. This course is both theoretical and practical. Students will be afforded the skills to create and distribute video stories. Additionally, students will be expected to display critical thinking around point of view, audience targeting, ROI success criteria, methodology, and production standards. Students are expected to exercise the craft of content creation while at the same time critically evaluating and deconstructing content they see in the marketplace.
*Students must prove their proficiency in video production to register for this course by meeting the minimum qualifications:
1. Proficient experience in editing video on the following platforms: Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, and/or DaVinci Resolve.
2. Experience in shooting video with either DSLRs or Video Cinema Cameras.
Please fill this form to the best of your ability. You may be reached out with further clarifications. If your form is approved, you will receive an add code to register for the course.
(
Tang
)
- 2022-2023 | Autumn 2022
MCDM Elective | 5 Credits
Saturdays 10/01, 10/15, 10/29, 11/12, 12/3, 9:00AM – 5:00PM | Online
Registration SLN: 13016
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 digital platforms such as 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.
commlead@uw.edu
206.543.6745
4101 E Stevens Way NE, Seattle, WA
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University of Washington
Department of Communication