The Grad Class Finally Comes Together

I spent today working on the syllabus for T511--A graduate course that I'm teaching with the title "Research Methods in Audience Analysis." It's one of those courses that is great because it's title allows lots of options.

My idea from the beginning was to combine the two types of audience research that our graduate students are interested in and/or should know about. The first is industry-related ratings research. The 'target' for this part of the course is masters students in our MS program who are interested in learning about the industry in more depth and how it operates.

The second is MA/PhD students who are interested in pursuing research of their own, mostly investigating hypotheses and furthering theory in mass comm.

In theory, the idea was that if both student 'audiences' would take the course they would not only learn stuff from their area of interest, but also grow to [at least] respect the inquiry done in the other arena. Great in theory, but as I've struggled with the schedule and cramming it all in it's been quite a challenge. I finally seemed to make some headway on it, though, and think that I'll be able to finalize it tomorrow.