LAP-5000 Liberal Arts and Professional Life

This course seeks to define the liberal arts and explore their relevance in today's world. Proceeding from the past to modern times, the course provides a broad overview of the liberal arts throughout the world, including history, the arts and sciences, literature, the social sciences, and philosophy/religion. With graduate mentor guidance, students will conduct independent research and will relate their findings to workplace or community experiences. As its major objective, this course examines the content, meaning, and interrelationship of the liberal arts and their direct relevance to the intellectual and moral formation of the working professional. Students will explore a selection of texts that illuminate fundamental issues outside of the workplace, in which professionals exercise their responsibilities. As part of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) curriculum, this course provides a basis for subsequent courses by encouraging an appreciation of the liberal arts as a formative influence in Western history and culture and establishing a common understanding of the implications of the professions and professionalism.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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SAM-5010 Sense of Community I: Art and Morality

This course examines art and morality through the unique perspective that "reading" artifacts can give to a true understanding of the development of communities in time. The course explores how art gives us access to commune with those here before us as well as those who exist with us, thus enhancing our senses of community and communications. Through this phenomenological approach, the course raises questions about the nature of what we create as both an expression of who we are and an influence that transforms us as new values (including morals and ethics) and realms of experience are created. The course defines "culture" as the interactive growth that brings out and develops uniquely human possibilities and develops sensitivity to the development of ideas and institutions as creative projects. Students will explore selected cultures that coexist with us in time as well as those that may have existed before us and are no more. The course emphasizes how this approach allows us to nurture our own possibilities out of the limitless depths of imagination and expressions as well as the magic power of art to produce understanding. Students will be prepared to incorporate their own imaginative abilities in the creation of individualized projects.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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SAM-5020 Sense of Community II: Faith and Reason

This course explores the character and quality of human discourse as it tries to describe what it means to be human in the great dialogues between faith and reason. This course is designed to help overcome perceptual obstacles to cross-cultural understanding through comparing and contrasting philosophical, scientific, and religious texts of Eastern, Western, and Native American cultures. Thus, students will gain a greater sense of being part of a larger global community while attaining a better understanding of their own cultural influences. Students will identify examples and case studies in their professional lives that relate to issues arising from the discussions of the texts and will use the lessons of human discourse as a platform to broaden their vision and create practical applications in the workplace and community. During this process of exploration, students will be expected to articulate their own values and beliefs with an understanding of how these may be influenced by their own cultural biases and perceptions.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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CCR-6100 Change, Conflict, and Resolution

This graduate-level course examines change, conflict, and resolution in both historic and contemporary contexts and invites students to apply these concepts to personal and professional lives while reflecting on their local, national, and global significance. Through assigned texts and readings, class discussions, and independent research in interdisciplinary subject areas, students will develop an understanding of change, conflict, and resolution as they relate to diverse cultures and eras, including the civil rights movement, women's rights, civil disobedience, working within the system, and revolution. The course will provide students with practical insights culled from a deep understanding of global change and will empower them with tools to steer and manage change in their lives and communities.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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SIC-5200 The Species, the Individual, and Community

In this interdisciplinary course, students explore "human nature" using theories and tools from biology and from many of the social sciences, including archeology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Students will learn the theories by reading both classic texts and recent scholarly works, including a novel about human evolution set in the Ice Age, and by watching videos, visiting websites, and writing several short papers. Ultimately, students will be asked to formulate their own understanding of "human nature" and to apply their insights to social situations at home, school, work, or the wider community.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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THC-6250 Technology and the Human Community: Challenges and Responses

Technology and the Human Community: Challenges and Responses looks at technology historically and philosophically. The course focuses on technological issues affecting contemporary and emerging professional, public, and private structures. A central issue is the role of the citizen in dealing with political, economic, and social pressures related to technology. A key purpose of this course is for students to exchange views by engaging in and discussing serious social and technological issues with a view toward their resolution.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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DHM-6100 Digital Communication

This course offers a study of theories and concepts of writing and rhetoric in digital media with emphasis on the uses of textual and visual media in digital spaces, such as websites, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs. Students will investigate topics in the emerging field of digital rhetoric and writing. The course will facilitate students' reflective interrogation of how they can command resources for writing in digital spaces to the greatest professional and academic effect. Students will explore how all digital spaces have rhetorical concerns and how their effectiveness – often understood as "usability" – is dependent on contextual factors like audience and occasion. In other words, students will explore how new and emerging technological means of communication and design can be better understood and deployed with the benefits of rhetorical study. This course will also help build the course offerings in the Professional Communication area of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) degree program and provide opportunities to students who are interested in digital publication as well as those who are interested in theories of digital composition and rhetoric.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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DHM-5100 Introduction to Digital Humanities

This course gives an overview of a field of study, research, teaching, and invention that explores what it means to be a human being in the networked information age. Students will engage in an interdisciplinary investigation of transmedia tools and methodologies for the creation and presentation of information. This course will be divided into two sections. In the first section, students will examine the history and emergence of digital humanities as a subfield co-created by librarians, computer scientists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars in visual art, media studies, literature and rhetoric, and composition. In the second section, students will learn and experiment with concepts and methods afforded by practitioners in digital humanities. In so doing, students will generate a project in which they will interrogate what it means to study the value of human expression in the context of a networked society.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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DHM-6200 Social Media and Social Change

This course gives an investigation of the role of social networking technologies in creating communities in digital and physical spaces. Students will examine how social networking and peer collaboration technologies have engendered participation in campaigns and movements for social change in the digital information age. Students will thoroughly explore the concept of "social change" itself by identifying the values embedded in dominant cultural narratives of progress and decline. Students will then turn their attention to the ways individuals and groups implement social media technologies to support or forestall social, political, and cultural changes. There will be particular focus on the social media tools that communities use to disseminate and preserve valuable cultural information and knowledge when freedoms of expression are limited by external controls. Students will analyze and apply concepts of network theory to create a project that traces the presence and function of social media in relation to a particular community campaign or movement.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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DHM-7100 Mapping Time, Space, and Identity

Geographic information system (GIS) technology offers a means for understanding how human beings inhabit and construct identities across time and space. Mapping Time, Space, and Identity explores how practitioners in the field of digital humanities deploy GIS tools to capture, analyze, and present data that illuminates how humans understand and create location in relation to selfhood. Students analyze scholarship based on nonlinear models of historical change, models that can be expressed in the spatial logics of trees, graphs, and maps. Considering such models of analysis, students will implement GIS and visualization technologies to conduct and support their investigations. Students will emerge from the course with a better understanding of how GIS mapping tools can be applied to the study of the humanities as well as in personal narrative.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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MLS-7000 Capstone I

This is the first of two courses needed to complete the Capstone Project for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program. The proposal is not the project itself but the foundation on which the student will create the project. The Capstone project represents new work and ideas. Although the idea may come from an issue or report previously undertaken, the project gives the student the opportunity to apply and interpret the ideas, practices, and/or skills learned during the MALS program.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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MLS-7100 Capstone II

This is the second of two courses needed to complete the Capstone project for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program. The Capstone project represents new work and ideas. Although the idea may come from an issue or report previously undertaken, the project gives the student the opportunity to apply and interpret the ideas, practices, and/or skills learned during the MALS program.

Note: Students must successfully complete the requirements of MLS-7000: Capstone I before enrolling in MLS-7100: Capstone II.

Credits: 3

Delivery Methods: Online

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Preview the Online Syllabus 
(Please visit the University bookstore to view the correct materials for each course by semester as the contents of the actual online syllabus may differ from the preview due to updates or revisions)