VCU Topics Courses

• Instructor: Alana Gleason
• Location/Room: online, synchronous
• Day/Time: Thursdays, 6:00-9:00pm 
• CRN: 50730
• Class level: Open to undergraduate and graduate students 
• Offered: Spring 2027, 3 credits, 15 weeks
• Please note that this course is open and accessible to all students regardless of major or academic level or skill.

Course Description

Create content for your favorite brand; in this course, you’ll re-envision their strategy, aesthetics, tone of voice, and influencer partnerships. Discover what a career in social media could look like for you by sampling every role within a social team all while building a robust, social-only portfolio piece.

Learning Objectives

• Give students the skills to articulate & unpack the value of social for businesses.
• Prepare students to plan, concept, execute, and report on social media content across leading social platforms.
• Craft a robust, social-only portfolio piece.
• Expose students to the dynamic career paths within social & the RVA community.

Instructor: Kayte Hamilton

• Location/Room: online, synchronous
• Day/Time: Tuesdays, 4:00-6:40pm 
• CRN: 52216
• Class level: Open to undergraduate and graduate students 
• Offered: Spring 2027, 3 credits, 15 weeks
• Please note that this course is open and accessible to all students regardless of major or academic level or skill.

Course Description

In a world drowning in data, knowing how to ask sharp questions and turn insights into strategy is a competitive advantage. This course teaches students to be smarter consumers and potential creators of marketing research. Data, in all its forms, are becoming an increasingly necessary input in making business decisions. This course will help you understand how consumer insights can be leveraged to inform marketing and advertising and related business functions such as new product development/innovation, customer satisfaction, and brand positioning. This practitioner-led Topics course demystifies marketing research for the next generation of marketers, strategists, and brand leaders. Students learn to ask powerful questions, evaluate research quality, and work effectively with insights teams whether they aspire to become researchers themselves or will commission research throughout their careers.

Learning Objectives

• Collaborate with research teams and translate data into strategic action.
• Evaluate research quality and distinguish between well-designed and poorly designed studies.
• Understand how to ask questions better and what makes questions powerful versus leading, vague, or biased in research and business strategy contexts.
• Evaluate effective research strategies and determine when research is needed and when it’s not.

• Instructor: Grant Walters
• Location/Room: online, synchronous
• Day/Time: Wednesdays, 5:00-8:00pm 
• CRN: 52221
• Class level: Open to undergraduate and graduate students 
• Offered: Spring 2027, 3 credits, 15 weeks
• Please note that this course is open and accessible to all students regardless of major or academic level or skill

Course Description

Explore the transformative role that generative artificial intelligence is taking on in modern advertising, branding, and marketing operations. You will learn to balance technical proficiency with strategic thinking, and understand when to leverage AI capabilities and when to preserve essential human expertise. You will gain hands-on experience with industry-leading AI tools by learning practical applications across brand strategy, creative development, account management, and production workflows. 

From prompt engineering to synthetic content creation, you will feel confident harnessing the cutting-edge AI platforms and processes reshaping the marketing and advertising landscape, while developing critical judgment about the appropriate boundaries between artificial and human intelligence in creative work.

Learning Objectives

• Integrate AI tools seamlessly into collaborative work environments across strategy, creative, account management, and production teams
• Critically evaluate when to apply AI solutions versus preserving human expertise and creative judgment
• Master prompt and context engineering techniques for optimal AI output across various workstreams and marketing applications, as well as building agents (agentic systems) to help with parallel, autonomous work
• Effectively utilize both general AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and more) and specialized platforms for marketing and advertising-specific tasks (like Perplexity for desk research, NotebookLM for synthesis, Google Gemini for image/video generation, ElevenLabs for voice, Replit for vibecoding, n8n for agent workflows, and more – subject to change)