About 310

Course Overview

COMSTRAT 310 Digital Content Promotion (Washington State University, The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication) is designed to help students apply writing, critical thinking, and persuasion skills to the practice and promotion of PR and advertising, in both digital and social media outlets. Students will explore various digital promotion technologies, as well as the use of emerging social media to study their ethical application in both advertising and PR.

REQUIRED TEXTBOOK
No textbook is required for this course. Related readings and lectures are provided for each lesson. Students will take low- stakes quizzes to demonstrate retention of content.

COURSE MATERIALS
To be successful in 310, students need access to a computer with Internet access and a Google account for various purposes. All required software and tools used in the course are free and web-based. We will use WordPress for all course content and Blackboard for assignment submission. Assignments must be properly submitted through Blackboard in order to receive credit.

HOW VIRTUAL 310 WORKS
COMSTRAT 310 will operate as a flipped classroom with students being responsible for watching lectures and doing readings outside of class meetings. After the first week, students will be placed into teams and typically will meet with the instructor once a week via Zoom. The Zoom link can be found inside Blackboard. Tuesdays will be reserved for students to watch lectures or work on team projects. Students can also use this time to schedule with the instructor. Please check the schedule due to holidays, guest speakers etc., not every week is the same.

Thursdays will be team meetings. Students will attend during their designated class and the instructor will place them in break-out rooms after a brief introduction. It is expected that students come prepared with questions about the assignment. Teams not meeting with the instructor can use this time to work with their team.

For extra credit, there will also be weekly individual check-ins via survey. This will allow students to raise any concerns. Questions that can we answered broadly should be posted in the questions for the instructor discussion thread. It is vital for you to read all emails, announcements, and assignment instructions thoroughly and carefully. Please don’t be afraid to ask questions.

At the beginning of the week, the instructor will post an announcement to help students stay on track. This announcement generally outlines the schedule for the week, includes any type of technology you might need to sign-up for, gives feedback on previous assignments and highlights due dates. I will also provide feedback on your assignments, please make sure you are reading it.

Students will include a variety of free tools including (but not limited to): padlet, Weebly, Google docs, Canva and Adobe Spark.

Learning Objectives

Develop and manage online content promotion and branded digital campaigns
Master the skill of resourcefulness – demonstrating the ability to critically think, research, draft and ultimately craft clear messages and digital materials that are organized, properly cited and apply correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling
Ability to develop and execute social media engagement and user-oriented content strategies
Evaluate campaign success in execution using key performance indicators and online tools for web development, email, metrics, and multimedia management
Practice, make mistakes, correct, and learn valuable, transferable skills