PRAO2046 Internal Communication and Employee Engagement (3 units)

Medium of Instruction:

English

Organizations recognize that effective communication with their workforce is crucial for sustaining success, reputation, and profitability.  Communication professionals are confronted with challenges to managing relationships and building engagement among various internal stakeholders.  This course covers a wide range of issues related to internal communication and employee engagement.  Students will learn strategies, tactics, and skills for effective planning for internal communication.

PRAO2055 Programming for Digital Communication (3 units)

Medium of Instruction:

English

This course is designed as an introduction to programming for data science.  It is structured to benefit mostly for students who have no or very little programming knowledge and experience.  This course is also used as a preparation for more advanced application courses of data analytics, data visualization, and algorithm.  The aim of this course, hence, is to take students, with no prior experience of thinking in a computational manner, to a point where they are capable of deriving algorithms and codes, using Python, and be ready to solve communication-related problems in the contexts of organizational communication, public relations, and advertising.  This course will provide students with the concepts and skills in computational thinking and data science.  Students will acquire hands-on experience using Python and the popular packages related to data manipulation, processing, and analysis.  Students are required to be able to independently develop Python codes in a professional manner for elementary algorithms in data science.

PRAO3046 Audience Measurement and Engagement (3 units)

Prerequisite:  Year 3 standing or above; PRAO2005 Introduction to Public Relations and Advertising (for non-PRA students)

Medium of Instruction:  English

This course will examine the roles of audience measurement and engagement strategies in the advertising and public relations context. All forms of media including online and offline media, as well as product placements, will be examined. With technological changes, this course will examine creative ways of engaging audience through social media presence, search-based targeting, and space/location based engagement.

PRAO3065 Fundraising Events, Sponsorships, and Donor Management (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Year 3 standing or above

Medium of Instruction:

English

This course will teach students the principles of fundraising for nonprofit organisations. This course will also look at several methods for raising funds from individuals, corporations, foundations, and the government. The importance of donor management and stewardship, fundraising planning process and assessment, and sponsorship will be discussed. The emphasis of this course is both theoretical and practical; we want students to use the ideas they learn in class directly to create and conduct a fundraising initiative for a local non-profit client.

PRAO3067 Health Communication and Information Campaigns (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Year 3 standing or above

Medium of Instruction:

English

This course provides an overview of the use of information campaigns as a tool to foster public health communication and enhance health outcomes. Students will learn about the critical role of communication theories and practices in campaign design, implementation, and evaluation. Students will also have the opportunity to examine significant issues and principles critical to the effectiveness of a health communication campaign. Topics to be covered in this course will include, but are not limited to, health promotion, disease prevention, risk and crisis communication in health settings, media representations of health, health information and misinformation, cultural conceptions of health and illness, e-health, and individual management of health beliefs, health information, and health behaviors.

PRAO3076 Communication Training for Organizations (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Completion of Year 2

Medium of Instruction:

English

In an ever-changing and fast-paced corporate world, communication training is indispensable for employees to improve their work productivity, efficiencies and relationships with colleagues and bosses.  Advancements in technology and diversity in organizations have also placed increasing emphasis on the need for communication training.  This course is designed to provide students with the knowledge, strategies and tools to become more effective and impactful workplace communicators.  Both theoretical and practical approaches to communication training will be examined in this course.  Specifically, this course starts with an overview of the communication training design process, needs assessment, and theories for effective learning and training transfer.  Then, various applied communication issues like workplace etiquette, diversity and cultural awareness, anger management, press conferences and virtual teams' communication will be studied.  Through a blend of lectures, group discussions and interactive workshop activities, students will be able to handle different communication scenarios and effect positive outcomes in and beyond the organizations.

PRAO4047 Service Experiences and Luxury Branding (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Year 3 standing or above

Medium of Instruction:

English

This course is designed to develop the perspective and intellectual ability of students in understanding the principles and practices of the services and luxury sector. Communicating branded services and luxury introduces a number of unique challenges, ranging from critical control over brand image, distinctive consumption pattern to emphasis on customer-brand  relationship. Students will explore aspects of brand management, market structure, and consumer profiles of the services and luxury industry. This course aims to engage students in a critical discussion on the complex interplay of cultural, economic and consumer factors in driving the development of service experiences and luxury branding.

PRAO3085 Social Media @ Work (3 units)

Medium of Instruction:

English

Modern information and communication technologies, especially social media, have profoundly changed the way that people work together.  Organizations must decide on the ways that they can use enterprise social media tools to support their internal and external processes.  Tools such as Facebook, WeChat, Jive, Slack, Socialcast, Periscope, Snapchat, Twitter, and WhatsApp are already used widely in organizations, yet many organizations struggle to use them effectively.  In this course, we study the influence that social media have on organizations from several perspectives.  First, we study the interplay between trends and innovations in society, IT (i.e., social media) and organization.  We provide an overview of the unique characteristics of social media, and discuss the most important theories regarding the use of IT and social media in organizations.  Second, we study the way in which organizations incorporate these new technologies in the work environment, for purposes of communication and collaboration (e.g., teleconferencing, virtual teams), knowledge management and sharing (e.g., via Networks of Practice), and to harness employees' creativity and expertise (e.g., via internal wiki's or innovation platforms). Third, we study how the modern-day professional (i.e., the knowledge worker), makes use of social media to support their everyday work and personal life.  We discuss the consequences of telework (e.g., via cloud-computing) in both professional and private life, we investigate how employees keep in touch with and work together with colleagues (e.g., via WhatsApp/ WeChat or social network sites), and we study how professionals express their professional identity online (e.g., via LinkedIn or Twitter).

PRAO3087 Organizational Communication Issues and Processes (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Year 2 standing or above

Organisational Communication Issues and Processes is about the communicative interaction between stakeholder within organisations. This course examines various (strategic) issues and processes relevant to communication in organisations. The course discusses management approaches and its consequences for organisational communication. Moreover it focuses on a variety of possible issues in organisations like: workplace relations, bullying behaviour, employee wellbeing, organisational justice and change.

PRAO4057 Organizational Decision Making and Problem Solving (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Year 3 standing or above

Medium of Instruction:

English

Problem solving is a set of activities and procedures designed to analyse a situation systematically and generate, implement, and evaluate solutions. Decision making is a mechanism for exercising judgment and making choices at each step of the problem-solving process. To come up with sound solutions to problems, one must understand the judgment processes so as to avoid one's own biases. This course introduces the fundamentals of human judgment processes such as biases, errors, heuristics and rationality. Judgment and decision making are examined in a variety of organizational contexts. Practical strategies are provided for changing and improving decision-making processes in reaching sensible and effective solutions for various problems in organizations and organizational communication.

PRAO4066 Leadership Communication (3 units)

Prerequisite:

Year 3 standing or above

Medium of Instruction:

English

This course introduces students to leadership communication studies. Students will be exposed to many writings and ideas of leadership theorists and practitioners. Emphasis will be given to the role of communication in leadership processes typified in emergence, influence, and outcomes. Students will analyse the thoughts and practices of various leadership studies, theories, and styles and will discuss their potential applications in modern organizations. Students will gain a broad understanding of how leadership emerges and is enacted on a daily basis through communication.

PRAO4075 Comprehensive Management Trainee Assessment (3 units)

Prerequisite:

cGPA 2.8 and Year 3 standing or above

This course introduces students to various types of management trainee programmes. Lectures cover basic and advanced concepts in assessment theory and research. Students participate in simulated aptitude tests assessing personality traits, analytical reasoning, and quantitative skills, experience simulated group interviews and one- on-one interviews. Students become familiar with management trainee selection process, develop confidence, and enhance career aspirations. The tangible outcome is the majority of the enrollees applying management trainee positions and make successful careers in management in the communication industry sector and other sectors as well.