The rigor of a UNC master’s
in a format that works for
your busy schedule
Over two years, a cohort of up to 20 working professionals advances through our program together, taking two courses per fall and spring term and one each summer. Projects throughout the program—especially in the culminating capstone and showcase—offer opportunities to use class assignments to take on challenges and projects in the real-world workplace.
Our rigorous, project-based curriculum allows students to explore the economic drivers and technological changes affecting media and communication organizations today. The 30-credit program features a prescribed set of courses designed to help working professionals bring immediate impact to their organizations and prepare for the next steps in their careers.
The curriculum has continually evolved since the program launched in 2011. Following extensive market research to identify the greatest areas of need for professionals and employers, we introduced an updated curriculum for the 2021 entering cohort. The university approved a revised culminating experience and completion timeline to launch for students entering in 2025. Course materials are updated each time a course is taught.
MADC students learn how to:
- Lead, plan strategically and harness agile, entrepreneurial thinking for beneficial change and innovation
- Find trends, patterns and stories in data and communicate insights that will drive impactful decision-making
- Create compelling stories across media platforms, deliver unforgettable user experiences and develop visual literacy to succeed in a design-focused world
Courses are mostly asynchronous and, starting in fall 2025, will follow UNC-Chapel Hill’s alternate academic calendar, utilized by several other online graduate programs. Students also participate in two on-campus experiences, a required immersion early in the program and a project showcase to complete the master’s degree.
Select a course or experience title below to expand its description.
Fall 1
About a week before classes begin, you’ll connect online with program administrators, faculty and your cohort of fellow working professionals to get ready for a strong start on your master’s journey.
You’ll learn about the format and expectations for your first-year classes and hear from current students about strategies for learning online and balancing school with family and work responsibilities. We’ll let you try out the online course system and make sure you know how to access other important resources, like the school and university libraries and Adobe Creative Cloud software, available to you as a Carolina student.
Why do audiences do what they do? How do you harness and interpret data to help drive communication strategy? With the fields of social psychology, consumer behavior and market research as your guides, you will identify an audience’s motivations, values and attitudes so you can more effectively analyze the what, why and how of audience behavior. Explore existing and emerging applied research techniques such as focus groups, eye-tracking, surveys and facial mapping.
This course is designed to help you:
- Collaborate with market and consumer research specialists
- Use the latest research technologies to understand and interpret audience insights
- Execute tactics to translate those insights into action plans
- Develop strategies to build social capital with target constituents, brand influencers and opinion leaders
Instructor
Rhonda Gibson
Dr. Gibson’s most recent research focuses on media portrayals of sexual minorities and the influence of these portrayals on both individual perceptions and public conversations.
How do you communicate a message through multiple platforms? How do you balance and navigate today’s blurring roles for media professionals, who now serve as producers/consumers, writers/readers and message senders/message receivers? Create flexible and strategic stories that can be disseminated through a variety of channels, including social media platforms, podcasts, video and text.
This course is designed to help you:
- Express yourself concisely and clearly in written and visual communication
- Distill and transform relevant, credible information into usable and compelling messages for content marketing, social media or journalistic storytelling
- Create flexible and strategic stories that can be disseminated via multiple platforms
Instructor
Andy Bechtel
Professor Bechtel teaches editing for print and digital media. He’s interested in headline writing, social media and alternative story forms.
Since our program’s founding, students’ learning online has been bolstered by connections they’ve strengthened with one another and with faculty while spending time together in person. During your first term in the program, you’ll visit campus in Chapel Hill for a few days to bond with your cohort, meet faculty and administrators in person, and get to know our town and campus. You’ll focus much of your time on the completion of a hands-on, intensive workshop with UNC Hussman faculty in a specialized communications area such as video storytelling.
To help students plan for this time on campus, we provide dates of the immersion experience with applicants’ admissions offers.
Spring 1
How do you extract useful information and knowledge from data in digital and social platforms? What do data actually mean, and how do you use that knowledge strategically? Learn to apply data in a variety of ways, from data-driven storytelling to creating actionable insights.
This course is designed to help you:
- Identify the appropriate analytics tools for projects
- Use data analysis to strategically respond to challenges and opportunities
- Uncover stories in data
- Make evidence-based decisions
What are the broad economic issues affecting today’s media landscape? How do you evaluate the strategies of your business or your competitors? Explore these questions for the industry through a comparative case study approach, investigating specific business challenges confronting start-ups and established companies such as Ogilvy, Comcast, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Disney-ABC, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Analyze the drivers of other content providers, such as streaming services, online aggregators and commerce sites, to gain lessons you can apply across industry segments.
This course is designed to help you:
- Understand methods and framework to assess future opportunities and risks of business enterprises you work for, compete against or create yourself
- “Talk business” with current and future employers, including CEOs, CFOs and CMOs
- Use processes and frameworks to create a business plan for start-ups and legacy organizations
Summer 1
What is distinctive, usable and understandable design? How is it central to a communicator’s success? In a flexible, creativity-based learning environment, you will explore best practices in online user experience, user interface design and website/app usability testing.
This course is designed to help you:
- Learn methods to envision and experiment with innovative solutions to user needs
- Develop strategies to map and optimize the user journey through visual elements
- Master visual literacy techniques to ensure success when managing digital design decisions
Instructor
Melissa Eggleston
As a user experience researcher and designer, Professor Eggleston helps people and organizations connect with their desired audiences through great experiences.
Fall 2
How do you determine when and where to engage with target audiences? With all the media options available today, how do you decide what to do and also what not to do, based on the consumer decision journey? Develop the strategic skills you need to execute a go-to-market plan, enabling you to market anything to anyone.
This course is designed to help you:
- Learn methods to find the underlying business problem and set attainable communications goals
- Develop strategies to identify and engage with target audiences
- Consider approaches to craft a compelling message that spreads
- Identify strategies to identify appropriate paid, owned, earned and shared media channels that build traction
How do you strategically measure, monitor and manage the organizational assets of brand image and reputation? What is the impact of reputation in business practice? Through a comparative case study approach, learn how to assign value to and manage reputation, regardless of your professional role and whether you work in the government, corporate or nonprofit sector. Examine how crisis communication and corporate social responsibility influence reputation.
This course is designed to help you:
- Learn methods to build your company’s brand and reputation
- Develop strategies to measure and monitor reputation
- Create strategies to recognize threats, assess risks and plan messages to manage reputational impact
Spring 2
How do you mobilize an organization to action, regardless of your job title? How do you influence decisions up, down and across your company? Drawing lessons from organizational psychology and change management, you will explore challenges faced by today’s media innovators and anyone hoping to make an impact in government, corporate or nonprofit arenas. You will learn how to drive change, to constantly adapt your thinking and to innovate more effectively, whether in an established organization or a start-up.
This course is designed to help you:
- Develop strategies to encourage entrepreneurial leadership within an organization
- Learn methods to amplify impact on decisions throughout your organization
- Execute strategies to manage industry change
Instructor
Marisa Porto
Professor Porto, the Knight Chair in Local News and Sustainability, specializes in transforming organizations for the digital world.
What iterative design-thinking approaches work for entrepreneurship and innovation? Experience the start-up process that allows you to practice thinking creatively about how to develop original media products and services. Using elements of marketing, journalism, technology, public speaking and business, engage in a direct experience that will prepare you for the challenges of creating innovative products.
This course is designed to help you:
- Face extreme uncertainty
- Make quick decisions with limited information
- Fail early and often, and learn from those failures
- Receive and give direct feedback
- Assess the viability and sustainability of digital products and services
Instructor
Kate Sheppard
Professor Sheppard is managing editor of The Assembly, a digital magazine focused on deep, nuanced journalism about North Carolina.
Summer 2
The final course in the program is focused on the research and writing of a professionally focused white paper to examine an issue or challenge facing an organization or business with a digital media focus. You may choose the subject of your capstone project and storytelling format(s) used to create a deeply researched report. Many students choose to focus final projects on their own employers or industries.
A faculty member will guide you through the completion of the capstone project, assisting as an editor and facilitating student collaboration for idea-sharing and peer editing.
At the conclusion of the capstone course, you will return to campus to complete the program by presenting your project with your fellow students to a panel of faculty evaluators in a new event, the project showcase. Following the presentation you’ll discuss your project and network with attendees, including fellow students and school and industry guests.
We’ll provide students with the date of the showcase well in advance and will share more details about as planning for the inaugural event progresses.