COMS 184: Social Media and Public Relations

Innovation • Application • Guided Experiment

Course Description

Examine and apply public relations principles and strategies to research, plan, execute, and evaluate social media management on different platforms. Through discussion, simulation projects, and certificate education, students explore brand communication strategies with different social media tools, social media policy, influencer marketing, employee advocacy, crisis social media, and social media measurement.

The enrollment capacity of this course is around 30 and it is an upper division course for both public relations (PR) and communication studies majors.

Overview of the Redesign Project

I'm strongly motivated to redesign my social media class to embrace more AI components so it will better prepare our students for the future workforce where social media professionals have been using AI tools for their daily work. To be specific, I have revised course materials to include more AI-related news and information, encouraged students to use AI in creating one of their social media posts and compare its performance with the ones created by humans, and added a class activity that invited our students to take AI literacy tests. I also invited my students to reflect on this experience and share whether or not they plan to use AI in the future and what their considerations are when they determine their approach to AI adoption. My redesign aligns with the course objective, and department/college/university needs in providing career-readiness curriculum to our students.

1. 1. AI literacy tests as introduction to the module
  2. Lectures on AI prompting guidelines and AI ethics in public relations
  3. Sharing of AI related news and information
  4. Hands-on project where students were guided to use AI tools to generate images/videos for their social media post
  5. Students reflected on this learning experience and discussed their approach to AI adoption

Assessment of the Redesign Project

Examples of Course Redesign
AI Literacy Tests and Lecture	Content Creation with AI Tools	Students' Reflection on AI Usage
AI Literacy Tests and AI Lecture	Students were guided to create their last social media post with AI tools, mainly focusing on image/video generation and caption generation. They will also be provided with data showing the engagement of these posts in the last week of the semester.	Students reflected on this module and shared their approach of AI adoption or avoidance in the future

Reflection

Through this course redesign, I was able to talk more about AI tools and even asked students to use AI tools in social media content creation. I think it is one thing that people are skeptical about AI, and it is another thing that you need to know what the strength and weakness these tools may have based on your first-hand experience. It is also interesting to learn that students have diverse opinions on AI adoption, with some being more progressive and other being more conservative. After I gave them the AI literacy tests and talked about prompting skills, they realized that AI skills and literacy are more than putting a question in ChatGPT, and it is necessary to learn more about the skills and apply them to practice to know where the boundaries are.

Faculty Biography

This table includes my faculty biography.
	Dr. Cheng Hong is Associate Professor at Department of Communication Studies, College of Arts and Letters. She mainly teaches public relations classes in Public Relations program, and she also teach research methods and data analysis classes in Communication Studies (General) program. Her research areas include entrepreneurship and public relations, corporate social advocacy, CEO activism, and social media.

**Program Sponsors**
	This work was supported by: Sacramento State Academic Affairs - Center for Teaching and Learning