Registration is now underway for Winter Quarter 2023! As our next installment in the Course Spotlight series, we\u2019re highlighting another graduate class being offered next quarter, WRD 532: Content Strategy. I sat down with instructor Dr. Lisa Dush to learn more about the course and what students can look forward to learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Main Idea (and Major Assignments)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As Dush wrote in the course description: \u201cIn WRD 532, we will explore the practice of content strategy in professional settings. You will learn how to assess existing organizational content, collaboratively develop a content strategy, and create guidelines and governance documents to manage organizational content. Through frequent situated tasks with our course\u2019s nonprofit partner organizations, you will also gain experience with key content strategy practices, such as auditing an organizational website, conducting a competitor analysis, designing content templates, and creating an editorial calendar. Finally, WRD 532 will prepare you to recognize and address key ethical and tactical challenges that today\u2019s content creators face.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The course balances practical and theoretical approaches to craft real-world deliverables for partner organizations of various missions and sizes. Breaking down the course structure, Dush shared that there is a consistent structure in each iteration of the course, which ensures that students have built-in deadlines to allow them to complete more comprehensive deliverables for partner organizations by the time the course ends. As Dush explained, \u201cThe general flow of the course is that we start off and do content critique, which is basically picking an organization and critiquing their content. Then, we get to the real work of a content audit of our partner organizations\u2026With the partner organizations, we start off with content audits, then articulating audiences for their content, then making some preliminary recommendations. After that, students get approval from the partner organizations and put the final plans in action, creating whatever is appropriate for the partner organizations\u2019 needs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the unique features of the course is that it challenges students to apply their developing knowledge from many different aspects of content strategy. In addition, Dush highlighted the student outcomes, in particular that \u201cone of the useful things for students that comes out of it is their content strategy reports, which work really well as portfolio and job search deliverables.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n New Developments<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Content Strategy was featured on the WRD Blog in 2021 as a Course Recap<\/a>, and many of the accomplishments and outcomes that students noted are still salient to the course\u2019s next installment. In particular, Dush pointed out that, while technology and tools are constantly evolving, \u201ccore ideas, like having a clear sense of your audiences and what you want them to do, stay the same.\u201d At the same time, new possibilities let students explore these \u201ccore ideas\u201d in new ways. \u201cIt\u2019s an exciting class because research is on the \u2018cutting edge\u2019 of developing technology.\u201d Dush discussed that she is vetting new readings to address this ongoing development in the field, and that the course readings are always shifting in different ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Critical Concepts<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of the most fascinating theories and techniques in Content Strategy revolve around intelligent content, which developed from the field of technical writing. Such concepts include the idea of making content intelligent by using markup, as well as structuring content so that it is modular and can be used for multiple purposes. Dush discussed that these ideas allow students to view content \u201cnot just as rhetorical fodder, but ideas that also get viability through how they\u2019re shaped.\u201d Intelligent content challenges students to view content differently as they draft, shape, and share it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n