SEM - Social Emerging Media

This course teaches the fundamentals of good storytelling while introducing techniques for engaging audiences across a variety of media forms. Students will explore how sound, images, interactivity, immersive video, virtual reality, and other emerging technologies are transforming storytelling practices in journalism, content writing, popular entertainment, and the arts. By the end of the course, students will demonstrate what they have learned by creating their own digital storytelling projects.

In this studio-based course, students will learn how to integrate diverse practices of art and design as they pertain to web-based, social media, and emerging visual communication. Students will gain necessary skills to unify visual concepts through an engagement with aesthetics, lighting, platform modification, and video presentation methods. This course will also give specific technical information regarding the use of the Adobe Creative Suite, and hands-on materials based research with a range of tools for digital recording and output.

A graduate level introduction to hands-on digital film production and post-production. Each student will complete several short projects. Students will be introduced to portable equipment at the cage and production facilities, including the black box studio space. Class will be comprised of technical demonstrations, in-class shoots and critiques of student work. Basic history, theory and aesthetics of related media are presented. Special emphasis will be given to the rapid concepting and shooting effective short social media content. The course will also present an introduction to producing content for augmented and virtual reality distribution.

This course prepares students to learn and apply strategic digital communication principles for analyzing the impact of media messages. Students will acquire knowledge and skills in media analytics to understand how audiences consume and interact with social and emerging media products. Using data recollection and analysis techniques, students will learn how to interpret data strategically, for identifying relevant consumer insights to add into actionable plans that respond to challenges and opportunities.

This course covers theories and research techniques needed for understanding digital audiences’ behavior and user experience towards media products. Social psychology and consumer behavior theories and concepts discussed in this class, will help students to identify audiences’ needs, values, and attitudes. Students will learn to apply research techniques (e.g. surveys, interviews, focus groups, eye-tracking, facial mapping, and user data retrieval) for understanding user interactions with content on social and emerging media platforms.

This course introduces students to the processes of developing and managing media projects, including ideation, prototyping, planning and budgeting, media asset management, workflows, and team communication. Students will demonstrate their mastery of development and management concepts by researching, writing, and presenting proposals for their own media projects.

This course explores how laws, policies, and industry practices influence the development and viability of emerging media. It covers subjects such as media ownership structures and industry competition, intellectual property, defamation and privacy law, SLAPP litigation, employee non-disclosure agreements, and wireless spectrum regulation. 

Advanced Production in Emerging Media is a course that studies and employs current and upcoming technologies in a hands-on production environment. The course will explore open source and emerging tools related to visual and aural media, immersive tools, mixed and virtual realities, alternative and embedded screens, physical computing, biosensors, trackers etc., and then break out into production teams to concept and create project with these emerging media. The group production team model mimics real-world experience within a production team on complex new media project. 

The capstone experience is the final course for the Master of Arts in Social and Emerging Media, and it culminates in a project that demonstrates the student’s expertise in the field. The capstone experience is largely independent, and students will plan and produce a project under the supervision of a faculty member. Students who choose to do so have the opportunity to coordinate work on their projects with a nonprofit organization or a business in the Tampa Bay area.