Students will develop skills in the areas of bitmap/vector graphics, audio/visual production and editing, 2D/3D modeling and animation, and video game design. Students will produce immersive environments while addressing and engaging issues of remix culture and intellectual property.

This course provides students with the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to produce responsive web content. Students will develop skills in the areas of website design, interactive and animated web content, mobile app development, and mobile game development.

An in depth examination of selected topics in communication, culture, information and technology. Topics vary from year to year, and the content in any given year depends on the instructor. The contact hours for this course may vary in terms of contact type (L, S, T, P) from year to year, but will be between 24-36 contact hours in total. See the UTM Timetable.

This course offers an overview of critical theoretical concepts and applies them to contemporary media. Students will use concepts from social theory, media studies and technology studies to critically analyze the many facets of the evolution and pervasiveness of digital media.

This course builds upon the concepts introduced in CCT218H5, Introduction to Digital Culture, through an exploration of the design and development of online information services (e.g. websites, digital libraries). It examines the standards, modeling approaches, and methods for testing. Students will experiment with different approaches to design of websites or other online services for different types of delivery devices (e.g. desktops, mobiles).

Communication campaigns and projects, whether they involve marketing, politics, or advertising require the establishment of objectives, tasks, and milestones. Furthermore developing and managing campaigns requires the development of knowledge and skills relating to the management of teams. Students will acquire analytic skills allowing them to understand the development and management of communication campaigns and projects. Current theory and research will comprise an integral part of the course as will study of the appropriate software tools. A significant component of the assessment for this course will be a group project that will involve the design of a communication campaign or project which will be presented to a group of experts.

This course examines the nature of communications in organizations. Communications are the glue that holds organizations together. Understanding theoretically and practically the multi-faceted functions of communication in and between organizations is essential for anyone seeking to develop a career in an organization whether it be private or public. Students will acquire analytic skills allowing them to understand organizational communication from a variety of different perspectives. They will also be required to develop and actively critique practical examples of organizational communication.

This is a project-based course that focuses on analyzing and evaluating the persuasive impact of the images we use every day to make decisions about our social networks, what we buy, how we live, what we care about, and who we are. Students will learn about rhetorical devices used in visual communications and then work in teams to create a persuasive awareness campaign for an NGO, Government Agency, Healthcare organization or other social interest group as the final project.

The principles and techniques of user-centered, functional design are introduced and applied to the analysis of software interfaces and the creation of multimedia documents. The roles of shared metaphors and mental models in clear, concise and usable designs are emphasized. Students will produce multimedia documents, which make effective use of text, colour, user input, audio, still, and time-based images.

An introduction to the cognitive, social, dyadic and group factors that shape communication and relational development between people. The objective of this course is for students to learn and apply the communication processes involved in encoding and decoding messages that help us understand others around us. Students will learn concepts, theories, and skills related to interpersonal communication. Topics include impression management, interpersonal influence, relational development, and conversational skills.

This course explores how infrastructures shape society, culture, and understanding of the human condition. We examine different infrastructures from electric networks to communication networks, data farms, environmental sensing systems, smart cities, and satellite technologies and our reliance on them. We will also examine how these infrastructures are sustained and maintained. By building on critical theories and approaches to infrastructures and their impact, the course investigates the power of infrastructure to establish the conditions of our daily lives.

This course provides students with an in-depth study and critical analysis of research methodologies within the discipline of communications and new media. Students will learn to explicitly identify generalizable findings, ethical concerns, study limitations, and new contributions to the field of knowledge using existing studies in qualitative, quantitative and mixed methodologies. Students will also gain experience in identifying and assessing problems within a research design and develop the ability to recommend revisions and/or new contexts and techniques for replicating the studies.

How does consumerism affect symbolic production, circulation and transactions? Major modern theories of mass communication will be presented (Fiske, Bourdieu, Benjamin, Jenkins, Frankfurt school, and Marxist approaches). Students will explore new structures of mass communication in relation to popular culture systems, and their economic, technological and institutional dimensions. Topics include Disney, Hollywood, celebrity culture, social media, and user generated content in digital environments.

This course provides an introduction to games studies. It reviews the history of games, from board and card games through to the latest digital games. It enables students to understand the medium of games through various lenses such as critical theory and ethnography. Students are introduced to the concepts of game narrative, the influence of technology in digital games, and the emergence of game paradigms such as casual games, serious games, game ‘modding’, and subversive play.

This course applies a variety of theoretical and practical approaches to consider the multiple and often conflicting ways representations in media are produced and consumed. The study of representations is approached from the perspective that they are best understood as both discursive and ideological. Questions to be examined include: What does it mean for historical and contemporary representations to carry economic, ideological and discursive power? To what extent do audiences hold power to resist or negotiate with representations? How might we interrogate the notion that we live in a post-feminist, post-racialized society in which older ideas about gender, race and power no longer apply or need re-thinking?

A study of theories in communication and meaning with different reference to advertising, advertising messages, and advertising management.

This course will instruct students in the use of programming languages such as Python or Processing for novel applications, including cases from animation, design, and information visualization. Appropriate use of code libraries, platforms and programming techniques will be developed. Assessment will be based on both programming and the expressive use of programs in their case context.

This course focuses on investigating the impacts of the digital enterprise on sustainability. The course presents an overview of the sustainability challenges and the concrete approaches to solving those challenges with the use of technology. The course uses an active learning approach allowing students the opportunity to learn while working on different sustainability projects linked to digital enterprises.

This course explores how media and media technology have shifted the nature of existing political and social orders. We will focus on how social movements and political change engage media and technology to disrupt social norms and practices that perpetuate inequality. This will bring us in contact with theories of social movement mobilization, political communication, and digital media. We may also explore the ways that legacy and digital media have changed to be in service of misinformation and state repression.

This course will provide students with an understanding of investment appraisal from a financial standpoint. It will provide them with the necessary tools to construct the financial component of a business plan and analyze the financial performance of a company. It will examine the practical problems of capital budgeting and highlight the techniques of performing ongoing monitoring of a company's financial health and risks.

Overview of individual and group behaviour in organizations, including motivation, communication, decision making, influence and group dynamics. Examination of major aspects of organizational design including structure, environment, technology, goals, size, inter-organizational relationships, innovation and change.

This course explores macroeconomics through the analysis of national and international crises. The course begins with a discussion of the nature of economics, a brief examination of markets, and a discussion of crisis and growth. We survey the institutions and dynamics of growth in the post WWII period, their breakdown in the 1960s and the spread of international crisis in the 1970s, and the crises of various economic policy responses from the 1980s to the present. After this historical overview, we explore macroeconomic theory and its development over the last 50 years. We study the Keynesian model and its emphasis on employment and output, its crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the rise of monetarist alternatives, the elaboration of aggregate supply and demand models highlighting prices instead of employment, the surge of supply-side and rational expectations economics during the Reagan administration and the continuing debates among economists over the merits and problems of the various theoretical approaches. The course closes with an examination the various forms of crises tied to the emergence of information and communications technologies and the knowledge economy.

Price setting is one of the most important marketing mix decisions, which involves understanding both supply side factors (e.g., costs), and demand side factors (e.g. consumer willingness to pay). In this course, we will approach the pricing decision with a more pragmatic view encompassing a comprehensive understanding of the demand side; both at the level of individual customer values, and the more aggregate level of price sensitivities of the market. Using diverse categories, such as healthcare, industrial products and consumer packaged goods, this course will equip students with economic and behavioral approaches to pricing, value pricing, price customization, price bundling and retail pricing strategies.

Approaches to the management of complex technical projects will be investigated. Topics include project estimating, costing and evaluation, organizing and managing project teams, quantitative methods for project planning and scheduling, introduction to computer-based project management tools. The course may involve an applied field project.

This course introduces students to critical approaches to social media drawing from theories and fields including software studies, platform studies, critical theory and political economy. The course provides students with tools and theories to analyze and understand current social media connectivity, and how social media platforms function as socio-cultural systems.

This course examines the policy and regulatory frameworks that shape media, culture, and technology in Canada. The course surveys the historical development of communication policy in Canada, broadly understood, and introduces students to issues and debates in the development of communication policy for specific sectors such as broadcasting, creative industries, platforms, and the internet.

This course introduces students to the strategies and processes of social innovation through usability studies, systems analysis, and artifact prototyping for new products or services for underserved groups. Students will learn various techniques of understanding user needs requirements and design methodologies, and apply this knowledge to create socially innovative prototypes to apply to real world situations. By the end of this course, students will have worked in groups to develop design alternatives for a technological artifact or system of their choosing, gain knowledge of human-centred design strategies and learn how to become change agents through case studies, best practice analyses, and relevant readings.

This course will examine the principles, theory and practice behind the production of games. By examining the history and contributions of early founders such as Atari and Activision, all the way to present-day leaders such as Electronic Arts and Sony, students will gain an understanding of how the global video game industry operates. The lectures and practical work will foster an approach to the understanding of game production issues including technology, law, marketplace and audience demand.

Technology continues to reshape the physical contours of our built environments as much as it redefines our conceptualization of how we inhabit and interact within them. This course investigates how urban form, space, infrastructure and communication are mediated by new and evolving technologies.

This course brings a gendered lens to the study of media and technology. The course explores the (re)production and (re)presentation of gender through communicative practices in a variety of mediums, including print media, TV, activist media, video games and online platforms. The course develops an understanding of gender ideologies and how media, technologies, and communication help produce gender. The course examines the way gender identities are constructed by mainstream and alternative media; gendered divisions of media and digital labour; the relationship between ICTs and the performance of gender and sexuality; masculinities, gender politics; feminist theory; and the construction and negotiation of gender in relation to mediated environments.