Overview
COMM 329: Mediated Interpersonal Communication is a three-credit, senior-level undergraduate communication course. It introduces you to interpersonal and business communication practices in social media and examines these from several perspectives.
Course lessons will teach you key interpersonal and business concepts and skills related to issues relevant to today’s social media world. Lesson readings and activities will ask you to consider and make sense of key terms by relating these to your own experience using social media communication.
Commentary activities will challenge you to discuss these concepts, skills, and issues with other students in ongoing online forums. You will be asked to relate these important key terms to contemporary news events where social media and business communication figure prominently. You will learn from one another’s insight about and experience with social media events and thus help build social and “learning” capital in a virtual group.
Assignments and the Final Examination will challenge you to assess how effectively you and other users communicate with social media. As well, you will be asked to reflect more broadly on the social, cultural, business, and ethical implications of using social media by thinking about how they influence your daily life.
In COMM 329 you will relate the concepts you learn from the course readings to your personal online experience and observations. You will examine how effectively users communicate and behave online, to what ends, and with what outcomes.
Learning outcomes
After successfully completing COMM 329, you will be able to
- describe how social media are rapidly transforming social and business practices.
- evaluate social sites from a critical perspective, using communication theory to make sense of online communities as rapidly evolving social and business phenomena.
- explain how social media prescribe unique discursive manifestations and how their users generate and promote online dialogue.
- observe participants in social sites as they share and negotiate meaning, and provide insight into how members of an online community define common objectives, resolve differences, and report online transgressions.
- examine the underlying interpersonal aspects of online forums and chat rooms.
- practise observational skills that help you understand how people present themselves and how they interact with others online.
- identify communication features that enhance the interaction between online users and evaluate the capacity of virtual spaces for fostering meaningful relationships.
- describe some of the methods business people use to manage the complexity of social interactions in online media.
- discuss some of the ethical challenges that communicating through social sites raises for businesses.
- discuss some of the implications of corporate social responsibility in a networked society.
- assess social media communication practices.
- progress from writing descriptively to writing analytically.
Evaluation
To receive credit for COMM 329, you must complete both assignments, all 4 commentaries, achieve a minimum grade of 50% on the final examination, and achieve an overall grade of at least D (50 percent) in the entire course. The distribution of marks for the various credit activities is listed below:
| Activity | Weight |
| Assignment 1 | 20% |
| Assignment 2 | 20% |
| Lesson commentaries | 20% |
| Final exam | 40% |
| Total | 100% |
The final examination for this course must be requested in advance and written under the supervision of an AU-approved exam invigilator. Invigilators include either ProctorU or an approved in-person invigilation centre that can accommodate online exams. Students are responsible for payment of any invigilation fees. Information on exam request deadlines, invigilators, and other exam-related questions, can be found at the Exams and grades section of the Calendar.
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University’s online Calendar.
Materials
Digital course materials
Links to the following course materials will be made available in the course:
Kerpen, D. (2019). Likeable social media: How to delight your customers, create an irresistible brand, and be generally amazing on all social networks that matter (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 9781260453287
Wright, K. B., & Webb, L. M. (Eds.). (2011). Computer-mediated communication in personal relationships. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing ISBN 9781433110818
Challenge for credit
Overview
The challenge for credit process allows you to demonstrate that you have acquired a command of the general subject matter, knowledge, intellectual and/or other skills that would normally be found in a university-level course.
Full information about challenge for credit can be found in the Undergraduate Calendar.
Evaluation
To receive credit for the COMM 329 challenge registration, you must achieve a grade of at least D (50 percent) on the examination.
Online Exam
Challenge for credit course registration form