This course offers a survey of the variety of theories and issues in communication in a systematic fashion and from a historical perspective, with a focus on those theories and issues that bear strong implications for the present situations of Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. This course seeks to establish a coherent understanding of the progressive development of the discipline of communication; provide a context for critical appreciation of current scholarship and research in communication; and offer a reasonable account of future conditions for human communication.

This is an introductory course to the study of media management in our era of change. The main purpose is to examine and analyse the new challenges being posed by political, economic and technological changes in the new millennium to media management in various Chinese societies. The course will begin with an overview of the media industries in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It moves on to deal with media operational strategies, media content production and management flow, media marketing management, information management for media organizations and resources management.

This course intends to introduce students with the principles and practices of financing, and corporate financial management. Fundamental concepts and applications of financial management in a dynamic financial market environment will be covered in the course, to develop students’ knowledge of fundamental financial management and their ability in understanding corporate decision in short-term and long-term financing, investing and financial planning. In particular, the function of financial institutions and capital market, the valuation, risks and returns of financial assets, the capital structure and cost of capital, debt services, budgeting and budgetary control and working capital management will be covered in this course. Students should obtain, through this course, a comprehension of the updated development of the theories and practices of corporate financial management.

Strategic Management is a big picture course that builds upon diverse business fields such as management, economics, marketing, finance, and accounting, among others. This course deals with an organization's overall postures from both inside and outside. It provides students with an integrative learning experience by applying what they have learned in their separate functional courses. The purpose is to help students develop strategic management knowledge and skills, gain experience in using the tools for strategic analysis, and apply the concepts to the real world situation. The case analysis is used extensively, and the focus is on how media companies and obtain a substainable competitive advantage.

The aim of this course is to give students an understanding of contemporary issues in global marketing and media issues, with a special focus on the Asia/Pacific region. The specific objective of this course is to focus on the practical problems involved in global marketing and media management, on a global and regional basis, in the context of the new millennium business environment.

It is expected that by the end of the programme students will be able to understand the principles of global marketing and its context, and develop and apply global marketing strategies, with an emphasis on the global versus local issue and standardized versus localized marketing and media mix. The assessment methods will be strongly oriented towards achieving this learning outcome, in the sense that they focus on the application of theory to real global marketing and media situations.

This course is intended to be a lab where students can execute their critical thinking and creative abilities in exploring the fascinating world of mass communication research. While the main purpose is to expose students to the fundamentals of social scientific research methods and to familiarize them with a variety of research techniques in mass communication research that are useful to media professionals (e.g. surveys, experiments, content analyses), students will also be encouraged or required to critically evaluate published research articles and creatively design their own research project.

This course is an introduction to and survey of the broad area of international and intercultural communication. Students will learn to develop their critical thinking skills through class discussion and the reading/writing assignments. The first half of the course focuses on international communication issues, including the Western media system, press freedom, the influence of new media in the globalization of communication, and transnational advertising and public relations. The second half of the course is devoted to intercultural communication topics. With an increase in awareness and understanding of the similarities and differences among different cultural values, students will broaden their worldview and be a better intercultural communicator. Students will be expected to interact with a person from a different culture throughout the semester.

This course aims at expanding students’ knowledge on the evolution of media and communication in contemporary Chinese societies. Close examination of some important events and major characteristics of the news media will enable students to understand the impact of these events that changed people’s perspectives about their societies and about themselves. Analysis on the role of the news media in specific events and the interplay between “the information provider” and “the information receiver” will help students to gain a profound understanding of the unique political, economic, and social dynamics in the Greater China Region.

This course introduces graduate-level critical thinking about the integrated nature of internal and external communications in the contemporary organization. Asian and Western organizational theories and the role communication plays within them are offered at the outset. Students then explore a variety of organizational structures and the kinds and volumes of information that flow in all directions bringing life to the organization. A major focus of the subject is on managerial communication in the Asian organization. Students investigate the importance of communication in carrying out motivation, leadership, team-building and the notions of quality and organizational change. The fundamental relationships of the organization to its external and internal environments and audiences are carefully observed with emphases on understanding, developing and applying communication strategies that attend to competitive advantages, organizational image and “handling issues”, crises and opportunities. The increasing impact of information technology on organizational communication is also assessed with regard to re-engineering, quality management and integrated marketing communication. The notion followed is that tomorrow’s business paradigm is not today’s business as usual.

Since the beginning of the 1990s “globalization” has become an increasingly important paradigm in social science fields. This resonates with the on-going process of globalizing culture and communications. The course examines the issue systematically, covering a wide range of topics in the framework of globalization, and provides students with a better understanding of the recurring themes and current trends in global communication.

The course will examine how communication functions within organizations and how communication behaviours can be managed to improve employer-employee relationships, employee-employee relationships, organizational efficiency, etc. Different theories, concepts, approaches, issues and processes of organization will be discussed and evaluated. The application of current theories and research findings in organizational analysis, diagnosis, and training will be emphasised.

This course aims to provide a framework for students to understand the skills and knowledge needed for the strategic planning of communication campaigns by integrating various elements in public relations, advertising and social media. The objective is to develop students’ capability to execute communication campaigns by working with professionals of different roles and functions in the industry.

This course aims to help students acquire up-to-date knowledge on eleven key aspects of journalistic practice and relevant theories. Existing theoretical propositions, evidence and practices with regard to these aspects will be explored in depth. Comparisons of the roles and functions of routine media practices in different social, political and economic environments are also subject to close scrutiny. The objective of the course is to familiarize students with current issues and cases in the field of mass communication.

The course introduces students to new media, with particular focus on multimedia, social media and the internet. The first part of the course examines the influence of new media technology on communication and social change. Through lectures, discussions, presentations and practical sessions, students learn how to make the best use of the latest communication tools to solve communication problems. Lab sessions are incorporated into the course to give students hands-on experience.

The course aims to help students understand the managerial and decision-making processes of advertising. Its objective is to develop students’ ability to analyse market and competitive environments, and to develop and present advertising solutions. The application of theories to analyse China and Hong Kong market situations will be emphasised.

This course provides instruction and writing practice designed to develop the professional-level writing skills expected of public relations practitioners, emphasising the multimedia approaches required for different audiences and media. This class will be consist of an introductory section where we will "talk about writing", followed by a practical section where we will simply write.

This course introduces basic concepts, theories and practices that operate in media markets, and the firms that operate within these markets. The course examines market structures, technologies, regulations, firm interactions (competition and cooperation, especially as codified in contracts), and sociocultural forces at work in media industries. By examining this range of factors and their interactions, students will become better informed and more capable in understanding the decisions that managers make within media firms. Accordingly, the course is aimed to achieve the following:

1. to provide a basic understanding of media firms as business entities operating in a market where multiple forces interact;

2. to equip students with the analytical tools to interpret the aforementioned forces and phenomena at work in media markets;

3. to enhance students’ knowledge of the media markets in both Hong Kong and mainland China.

This course will not only examine communication in crises but show what we can do to prevent or minimize the impacts of such crises. Important concepts of strategic management of public relations, issues management, risk communication, activism, crisis communication principles and crisis communication in both traditional and new media will be covered. Local and overseas cases will be incorporated to teach students how to deal with crises in real situations. Different methods and approaches for resolving different types of crisis will be discussed, showing how for example prevention and resolution of a natural crisis and a confrontational crisis should be different, with the former emphasising in the region’s infrastructure and the latter highlighting the human context of a conflict. As a result, students will not only study and analyse the communication tools for a crisis but discuss an organization’s management. This course is a multiple-disciplinary course that helps students integrate the knowledge from communication, sociology, psychology and management in dealing crises with complicated contexts.

The course will help students understand the challenges and difficulties in designing and implementing advertising across different countries and societies. Students will learn about the issues of centralization versus decentralization and standardization versus localization. They will also learn practical issues such as regulation considerations and social responsibility of international advertising agencies. As an institution, business and industry, advertising has been a major force shaping the worldwide drive toward globalization. This course is designed to enhance students’ understanding of advertising in the fast-changing global environment and assist them in developing skills necessary to plan and implement international advertising programmes.

The course will help students understand the challenges in planning and implementing an advertising strategy in China. Specifically, students will develop the ability to analyse the dynamic and diverse market environment in China and to strategically plan and implement advertising solutions there. Issues relevant to developing advertising solutions in China will be discussed, such as understanding its market structure, culture, consumption patterns, branding issues in international and local business, as well as the opportunities and challenges brought on by the new media. Being an institution, business and industry, advertising has been a major force shaping market development in China. The course is designed to enhance the students’ understanding of the fast-changing market environment there and to assist them in developing the strategic thinking and skills necessary to plan and implement advertising programmes.

The Project allows students the opportunity to describe and analyze communication issues by applying various perspectives and skills they have learned in their coursework. Preparing the Project enables them to integrate diverse sources of information and develop critical thinking through the process of constructing ideas and gathering, organising and analysing massive data.  Completion of the Project serves a central role in showcasing the student’s ability to organize knowledge, structure argument, provide evidence and present results within a single piece of research work.

This course studies how an understanding of consumer behaviour informs the development and implementation of communication campaigns in Hong Kong and Asia. It examines the consumer decision-making process and how it varies for different types of purchases; the psychological processes involved, including the consumer learning process; and external factors such as culture, social class, group influences and situational determinants. Global consumer issues including the effects of social networks and consumer activism on companies’ communication strategies will be examined. Application of current theories and research findings in cross-cultural consumer studies will be emphasised.

The course introduces various aspects of political communication in modern society. It attempts to acquaint students with studies of the nature of news media coverage of politics, the effects of news coverage on the public and policy, and the relationship between news media and policy makers. A good part of the course is devoted to political communication in the digital context.

Young people are a global market for products, services and ideas. “Youth” is defined as the population aged between 15 and 24. This course aims to equip students with the knowledge needed to make informed decisions about marketing to young people or to weigh suggestions made about limiting marketing to “youth”. The course will examine the interplay of the youth segment and the market environment. Based on research evidence, students will identify issues related to youth and media usage, and the roles of personal as well as marketing communication on youth consumption.

The advent of social media and mobile media devices, such as smartphones and tablets, is rapidly changing human interaction, including business models. Millions of people worldwide are living much of their lives on SNS, such as Facebook, Twitter, Blog, YouTube and LinkedIn in the United States, and Renren, Weibo in China. Global internet users spent more than one fifth of online time on social network sites or blogs. The trend exemplifies that human interaction, including business environment, has being deeply transformed by social media.

This course seeks to address the following four key questions:

(1) What are social media, and how do they transform business models?

(2) What platforms and opportunities do social media provide for business, big or small?

(3) How to analyse and develop social media marketing strategies?

(4) How to cultivate yourself to become a social media researcher and strategist?

The purpose of this course is to familiarise students with the practical applications and the theoretical implications of social media-related technologies. The course is grounded in practice, and students will be required to participate in social networks, forums, microblogs, and more. We will examine their economic, social, and cultural implications, and cover some of the latest developments in the social media area. We will also explore techniques for collecting and analysing social media data.

The course introduces the science and theory of social networks, and the artful process of communicating through them. Social networks refer to the collective structure of human relationships through which we communicate. Recognizing and understanding this relationship-based structure is essential for crafting a communications strategy. Operative strategies can be developed for quickly getting a message to a target audience or thoroughly harvesting messages from them, be it through word-of-mouth, traditional media channels, or through new media technology. The communications professional must be skilfully adept at assessing the social structure of a target group and evaluating the influence specific individuals have within the structure.

This course provides the students with the tools to purposefully map and quantify the network’s structure and identify those individuals who have social influence over the group. Students will learn how to craft a communications strategy and tactics for communicating to the entire group in a cost-effective manner. This course is combination of theory and real-world application of contemporary communication and network techniques, such as visualization, group and individual measurement, communication-effectiveness analysis, and tactical planning. Lab sessions and group activities are incorporated into the course to provide students with hands-on practice of concepts and ideas.

This course will introduce students to the field of data visualization. Students will (1) learn basic visualization design and evaluation principles, (2) be tutored on how to find and download datasets of interests, and (3) develop programming skills to create a good variety of common charts for effective data exploration and visualization. By the end of the semester, students are expected to become educated critiques of data visualization and comfortable programmers who are able to acquire, explore and visualize large datasets. They will also become familiar with the self-learning resources on R to continue to sharpen their skills beyond this course.

This course aims to introduce the fundamental knowledge and hands-on skills of big data analytics in the field of media and communication. Special focus will be placed on techniques for searching, collecting, analysing, interpreting, and visualizing data. Technical details include, but not limited to, web crawling, data storage, data analysis, text mining, social network analysis, and data visualization, based on open source software packages. Through a variety of teaching learning activities, such as class demonstrations, individual exercises, quizzes, collaborative projects, and guest lectures, by the end of the semester, students are expected to become capable to collect big data from different data sources, i.e. social media harvesting, web scraping, online archiving or indexing data retrieving, with open source software packages. Students are also expected to produce socially, culturally, or commercially meaningful data-driven narrative outputs, such as data-driven journalistic report, data visualization, data-driven business analysis, and computational social science research reports. Meanwhile, critical reflection on the overuse and abuse of big data and relevant ethical and legal controversies will be discussed throughout the semester as well.

This course is designed to introduce theories and evidence that describe and explain how technologies affect communication occurs at individual, interpersonal, group, and community levels. It will cover multiple perspectives that account for communication processes involving technologies. Students will be exposed to research on communication technologies in interpersonal relationships, online groups, political movements, business practices, and health contexts. Practical implications will also be discussed through evaluating and critiquing designs of communication technologies.

The aims of this course include teaching students the required new media design (e.g. user interface design and user experience design), prototype creating, usability research, and students will also be taught critical thinking and analysis skills to understand how well designed new media, in reverse, affect human communication and interaction. At the end of the semester, students will create dynamic and interactive projects (mobile app prototypes) by they own. This course positions the students for a broader scope of career in interactive, and user experience design for the digital marketing, mobile, entertainment and corporate design.

We begin the semester by understanding what a brand is and what it is not, and by recognizing the source of brands, which in today's world is innovation. We will explore the innovation equation of breakthrough goals + knowledge + imagination + total commitment=breakthrough ideas. Each step of the equation will be punctuated by current case examples, many from the professor's own experiences creating, positioning and launching over 220 brands over the last 27 years. We will follow innovation with brand ideation, using the five-step approach for framing the brand concept (problem, solution, benefit, how it works and don't worry). We will then focus the brand concept with a comprehensive understanding of the Three T's criteria for brand positioning success (Tangible Benefit, Truth, That's Me), born from the professor's interaction with over 18,000 consumers across the world. Finally, we will learn how to execute the brand into the marketplace following the Integrated Marketing Communication model and the media mix of Paid Owned Earned Micro (POEM). Again, actual and current cases will embellish the learning and stimulate discussion.

This course is built upon the experience and the knowledge gained from creating world class brands and through an in-depth mastery of brand positioning. Knowledge gained in this course can be put to use immediately and has the potential to greatly improve the student's success globally, particularly in China, as the country moves from a manufacturing-centric economy to a consumer-centric economy.

The course aims to offer students the latest knowledge as well as critical and reflective perspectives on how “algorithm,” i.e., a finite sequence of rules operating on some input yielding some output after a finite number of step for computer programmes, are shaping, and shaped by, humans’ culture and society. Algorithmic culture is defined as the extent to which people, places, objects, and ideas are ranked, classified, and hierarchized by algorithm-based computational processes. Nowadays algorithm is a crucial component in all aspects of digital communication practice, such as recommender systems, search engines, social media bots, automated content generation systems, immersive media such as virtual reality and augmented reality, and AI-assisted news production systems. This course interrogates how these algorithm-driven media technologies are casting cultural, social, and political impacts on the society, and aims to reveal the power and control hidden behind the algorithmic systems. Special focus will be placed on an array of highly controversial and timely topics, such as the algorithmic discrimination on gender and race, algorithm-confounded cultural values and tastes, censorship, political ideologies, and identities.

This course approaches the objective from two folds: For Technology and By Technology. It is highly likely the students will report technology company, event and trend upon graduation. Or they may be PR specialists for a technology company. The duly acquired knowledge about the latest technology from this course can make them more accurate and more confident in the communication process. This is the "for technology" part of this course. Once the students become technology literate, they can create new product, new business model and new workflow, with the help of the new technology. This is the "by technology" part of this course. With the two folds exercises, we expect the students to be serious thinkers and thought leaders in the changing world, not only understanding technology and its influence on communication, but also constantly reflecting the power, its misuse and social implications.

This course is not just about dreary numbers or dull statistics. The aim of the course is to nurture communication workers with necessary data literacy at its core through case studies and hands-on practice of data skills. Throughout the course, students will learn how to work with data, including finding data, identifying and evaluating data, analysing data, visualizing data, and reporting data. Students will end the semester by producing data-based projects via a concrete process of conceptualization and realization of data for a specific topic of interest.

Media convergence is a relatively new phenomenon in the evolution of communication technology. Similar to other forms of modern-day information dissemination, media convergence is not merely a phase in technological advancement. Rather, it is immersed in cultural, social and political reality in people’s immediate life space. Optimists and technological-determinists believe that the advanced technologies will transform the society and empower individuals in the democratic process. Yet, both critical scholars and empirical researchers contend that technology is the main source of new problems such as digital divide rather than a solution to social inequality. This course traces the trajectory of media convergence and reflects on its profound impact on the everyday life of the self, media industries, political systems, and academic research. The main micro- and macro-theoretical concepts include: multiplicity in social media self-presentation, pseudo-community, interactivity, multi-mediality and cyber identity, platformization and regulation, new news value and media routines, online materiality，the network society, digital labor and digital divide.

Global Human Resources Management (GHRM) has been identified as a crucial factor in a firm's international success. GHRM is more complex and varied than domestic HRM and incorporates a broader scope, and increased risk exposure as well as a change of emphasis. This course will examine environmental elements and the characteristics of GHRM. It will deal with the practical issues and consequences of the internationalization of HRM.

Due to constant changes in the market, a corporation often needs to restructure itself in order to remain its own compatibility and success. At the same time, the corporate leader has a vital role in developing the organization to its next level of success. Leadership is a process of influence in which one enlists the assistance and support of others in achieving a planned goal.

Thus, for a company to successfully implement any organizational change initiative, it is a must that effective leadership is developed and in place in order to get the job done. This course helps to increase the knowledge of the students on how leadership can be developed and its role in organizational development. The first part of this course includes various leadership theories approaches, models and skill sets. For the organizational development part, students will gain understanding on important determinants, key components, and success factors of an effective organization developmental process.

The aim of this course is to provide students with the knowledge and skills needed to analyse and solve marketing communication problems at a strategic level, taking into account its impact on the firm as well as the local and global society.

The scope of this course covers corporate and individual entrepreneurship, in particular, new venture creation. The entrepreneurial process, namely, from idea generation to the formation of a start-up company with successful venture capital funding and management team in place will be examined. A special attention will be paid to the critical elements of entrepreneurial activities including, but not limited to, business plan development, venture team building, business model development, business feasibility, resource allocation, and the valuation of ventures. Students will be exposed to the latest and standard international practices of the venture capital industry as well as to the regional variations of the Asean countries. Finally, selected cases and key lessons learned from China entrepreneurial development in the past 20 years will be critically examined in the course as part of the development and the shaping of the entrepreneurial orientation of students.