Courses

The reality of organizations today is that you will likely work on a team, if not many! A highly functioning team arrives at solutions and results that are better than any individual could have achieved alone. A dysfunctional team can create challenges ranging from distrust and frustration to ineffective business decisions and outcomes. In this course you will learn the best practices for building and leading high-performing teams.

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The skills that a manager of people needs may be vastly different from the technical skills needed to perform day-to-day work. This course gives participants the best practices in management skills currently being used at leading organizations, including strategic hiring and interviewing, performance management, and employee engagement and retention.

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Most professionals face some level of apprehension when giving a presentation. This course will increase your confidence and verbal and non-verbal communication skills in situations ranging from giving an update at a team meeting to a large group presentation. Using technology offered through the online course system, participants will record their talks and receive constructive feedback from the instructor.

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In this course, public relations practitioners will be given the opportunity to explore theories of ethical reasoning and consider their implications for the dominant theories of public relations strategy and practice over the last century, from P.T. Barnum and Ivy Lee to Edward Bernays and Arthur Page. By the end of the course, each student will have prepared a statement of ethical principles and a practical guide to ethical reasoning, consistent with their personal values and appropriate to their practice of their discipline.

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Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is the way organizations plan and present unified and consistent messages to their target audiences. IMC incorporates advertising, public relations, direct marketing, promotions, and digital media through traditional and non-traditional channels to communicate to various publics. It is a holistic approach to marketing based upon an understanding of how consumers think, make decisions, and act. The purpose of this course is to assist professionals to learn how to develop a strategic IMC plan.

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Digital assets are the atomic “building blocks” of the content universe, and they are key parts of a dynamic, changing, and much larger technology landscape. Numerous other systems also interoperate with Digital Asset Management (DAM). This course explains how DAM interacts with product information or collections information management, web/print publishing, social media, marketing resource management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and other systems. Application programming interfaces (API), micro services, and partnering with IT are central to getting started and being ready to keep up. We’ll cover the techniques for keeping alert for ever-present changes in the digital landscape that are key as technology and organizational needs evolve and change. Awareness of all these factors are critical to being an effective DAM leader.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Define and Synthesize the Content Landscape in your organization.
2. Understand how DAM integrates and interacts with other systems within and external to organizations.
3. Formulate practices in order effectively partner with IT.
4. Evaluate and critique DAM’s role in current and upcoming content projects.
5. Demonstrate knowledge of APIs and Microservices.
6. Position for the ever-changing DAM landscape for optimal updates and enhancements.
7. Illustrate knowledge of being an effective DAM leader.

The Interpersonal Communication course provides students with tools and strategies for increasing their effectiveness in communication interactions. This will help them in order to adapt messages to reach different listeners, get messages across more clearly, and build stronger relationships.

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This course is designed to help you recognize significant leadership and communication theories in order to guide you in integrating favorite elements of those theories into a set of personal best practices in leadership and communication.

With so many workplace interactions taking place virtually, leading a team of dispersed and often cross-cultural professionals is a skill 21st century leaders need. This course addresses team dynamics, team leadership, and virtual communication technologies and communication methods.

In today's world, while image assets are very much alive and well - the exponential growth of video has quickly become an almost standard for communicating with our customers and communities. Traditionally, our DAM (digital asset management) systems have been optimized to handle image assets - but this is quickly shifting as organizations struggle to keep up with the rapidly increasing video consumption. You’ll learn about managing video, whether on network drives, external hard drives or held by third-party agencies - and why YouTube is not video management. This course explains how your DAM and your role, as a DAM Manager, are impacted by each step of the video production process - which includes how video is created at each step, and the vast amount of metadata - from descriptive to administrative to legal - that is required to be generated and tracked to ultimately be able to distribute and reuse the video content. We will explore the differences and similarities between DAM and MAM (media asset management), and when it’s time to think about having one of each. From this class, a DAM practitioner will have both a foundational understanding of video-as-asset and be able to analyze the needs of a DAM from a video perspective.

Metadata: it’s everywhere! The better a digital object is described, the better our search and reporting results are. This class provides the foundational insights into the various types of metadata available for inclusion in a Digital Asset Management system. Learn core ideas and processes of how standards work in a dynamic world. Along with the basic principles of metadata, we’ll explore best practices of how DAM systems can keep up with the changing terminology and the meaning of language.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. List the seven main types of metadata and provide examples of each.
2. Identify existing metadata standards that are appropriate to implement in your (real or imaginary) DAM.
3. Approach to the methodology and tools to use when researching and analyzing metadata fields to include in a DAM.
4. Develop a base set of Metadata terms and controlled vocabularies for inclusion in a DAM.
5. Apply base metadata to several content types such as: still image, text-based content, moving image.

Create a metadata implementation plan for a DAM system.

This course examines the intersections between organizational culture and leadership and how they impact successful change leadership, offering specific tools, knowledge and skills needed to be an effective change agent.

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Persuasion and negotiation are skills that are paramount to the successful professional. The course will help you to apply persuasive techniques to your verbal and written messages in the workplace. In addition, you will learn how to prepare for and conduct effective negotiation techniques in your interpersonal communication interactions.

The course will help students understand what drives CSR and why it is a fundamental part of major companies. By examining various CSR initiatives and analyzing the communications surrounding them, students will gain a thorough understanding of CSR communication methods, issues associated with delivering CSR messages, and learn how to effectively and efficiently communicate those initiatives.

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Rights management is both the gas and the governor that powers using digital assets. The proliferation of digital media, as well as mechanisms and markets to exploit it, has increased both the importance and complexity of rights management. The successful DAM implementation will moderate and simplify rights as best it can to inform effective and efficient digital asset management and usage. The more DAM and Rights work together, the easier it is to both maximize usage and avoid the risk of non-compliance. This course provides a foundational understanding of rights management concepts from all sectors as well as insights that build on other DAM related topics such as metadata, data governance, and integrations that power successful DAM implementations.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand the basic elements and terminology of Rights Management as it pertains to Digital Asset Management.
2. Understand the importance of Intellectual Property (IP) including the four types of IP and more specifically, copyright and trademarks, as these have significant implications for DAM practitioners.
3. Develop insights into the complexity of rights management and discover techniques for simplifying rights complexity to help increase rights awareness while reducing “friction” caused by rights complexity.
4. Gain insights into how contextual use can create gray areas for rights interpretations and to use practical techniques for empowering their users while continuing to manage risk of misuse.
5. Learn techniques for controlling content access in the context of acquired rights.
6. Understand the importance of aligning DAM ROI and commercialization of assets while still being compliant with acquired rights positions.
7. Create an actionable plan and tailored approach for aligning and implementing rights management practices with your DAM practices based on where you and your organization are with your DAM capability release strategy.

Today’s PR professional has the opportunity to practice much more than media relations; thanks to the blending of digital with traditional media, we not only have more ways to reach our audiences, we have more ways to measure the outcomes of our efforts as well. But far too many professionals are still wary of measurement. The truth is, it’s not tough, it doesn’t have to be complicated and, when done right, it can shine new light on how your strategy is working (or not). This course will teach you the strategic approach to putting an effective measurement program in place that supports business objectives, even if you’re on a shoestring budget.

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This course offers a comprehensive and focused new approach to communication and relationship building through the integration of new media. Companies today cannot afford to view social media through a traditional lens or with only tactical methods. Their approach must be strategic and include customized stories and meaningful content to share through new media channels. Stakeholders want direct engagement and to actively take part in conversations and collaboration with their favorite brands. Participants will learn how the approach to public relations and communications has changed, beginning with incorporating social media into the public relations planning process.

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The Strategic Communication Planning course is designed to help students think and act strategically, give them a working knowledge of the tools and techniques that will help them develop an action plan, and show them how to communicate it successfully.

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This course offers participants with an interest in public relations or organizational communications an opportunity to gain insight into the practice of strategic public relations. The lessons in this course are designed to help participants learn to see the PR process more strategically, including understanding research and planning, knowing how to make strategic choices, selecting from a multitude of tactical options, and evaluating program effectiveness.

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Planning for successful Digital Asset Management (DAM) has one meaning the day DAM launches, and once the initial goals are met, more challenges arise. Understanding how to plan for long-term operations and growth is essential. This course covers how to plan for enduring success with DAM, including the Digital Asset Management Capability Maturity Model--the industry's best guide and tool for success. Staffing, job roles, answering the question of “where does DAM report,” and managing how these will change through time are core to understanding how DAM implementations can be successful or fail. Insights on how to create metrics and measurement for DAM systems, best practices for developing deep organizational allegiances to support an ever-expanding network of use cases and persistent innovations, and securing budgets and constructive vendor relationships are just some of the lessons that lead to DAM successes.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Explain factors distinguishing software implementation success and failure factors and generalize them to DAM.
2. Evaluate and defend how DAM component operations impact DAM success in the organization.
3. Apply the insights about DAM success to larger organizational/business goals on a recurring basis.
4. Understand and synthesize how DAM is set in an active context of much broader organizational and business operations.
5. Analyze and prepare for justifying persistent investment in the human capital needed to operate DAM.
6. Assess, describe and predict how DAM operations impact near-term and long-term organizational risk - preferably to mitigate risk.
7. Formulate DAM governance practices in order to effectively work with enterprise governance boards across multiple enterprise applications.
8. Demonstrate DAM’s impact on organizational / business valuation.
9. Justify and support DAM to become “at the table” in mergers, acquisitions and deaccession events.
10. Illustrate knowledge of how data, metrics and measurements support enterprise DAM and prove success.

Businesses and organizations of all types rely on digital asset management systems (DAMs) to store content and enable internal and external resources to connect and share assets and information. As the global demand to access and engage with digital materials increases, it is no longer sufficient to deposit assets into a database without leveraging modern approaches and technologies in order to create a smart, interconnected content ecosystem for stakeholders and content consumers. Improved classification tools, structured metadata and DAM systems, collaborative environments, and open standards enable the creation of rich semantic content and dynamic media consumption. This course will explore the underlying structure of a DAM, how digital assets are stored, enriched, published, and integrated into Web content. Special attention will be given to Web and DAM standards for creating semantic metadata, efficient processes and tools, and Linked-data collections.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand basic components, processes, and data formats encountered in using a DAM system  or other online environments sufficiently to develop business requirements for working on a team evaluating or developing a DAM system.
2. Develop an understanding of how structured content can be organized, encoded, and validated to ensure it satisfies required business rules and requirements.
3. Understand how metadata is gathered, formatted, and stored, to help and how these processes are related to business requirements and impact system selection and design.
4. Gain insight into how metadata and content assets may be modular, reused, and how it affects metadata model design.
5. Gain insight into different data storage methods and their related search tools to enable developing business requirements for searching for digital assets.
6. Explore various indexing, cataloging, and knowledge organization approaches and how they may benefit a DAM system’s capabilities.

Digital assets are digital files and the corresponding metadata used to accurately and succinctly describe those files. Typical digital asset formats include digital images, documents, technical art files, videos, and audio files, and are ever-evolving. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the blend of software and business practices used to manage these digital assets. In the premiere Rutgers course for the Bronze Certificate Program, Evolving World of DAM, a larger worldview is revealed for what a DAM system is and what a DAM system is not. Whether the DAM functions to support a film production studio, a video game boutique, an online hardware store, an international publishing house or a local archive, the course explores the foundational concepts, components, and organizational values expected of every DAM system, as well as the ten core characteristics required for managing DAM system success. At the same time, the course introduces new, existing, and future DAM practitioners to what it means to shape a career in the evolving world of DAM.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Define digital assets and identify how digital assets are used while summarizing the origins of digital assets.
2. Provide examples of DAM system key components, and outline the ten core DAM system characteristics. 
3. Explore and discover DAM careers, and describe the role of IT (Information Technology) in DAM systems.
4. Design a simple DAM use case, distinguish between work-in-progress and finished assets, and identify how to facilitate DAM adoption practices.