As part of your online graduate program, you’ll participate in a 1-credit-hour Industry Immersive course designed to expose you to industry professionals and prepare you for real-world applications in your field. Offered over 8 weeks in an asynchronous format, this course can be completed at your pace within the timeframe the course is open and provides valuable insights and content created by subject matter experts in your specific field. Through a series of archived workshops and activities, you’ll explore topics which may include: Data Visualization (DAV): Storytelling with data and engaging with the world as a data visualization professional. Business for Creatives (BC): Digital leverage through social media and sponsorship, and strategies for leveraging AI in small businesses. User Experience Design (UXD): Applying psychology to create better products and services and mastering design prompt engineering. Professional Development (All): Career advancement strategies, networking techniques, and industry-specific best practices. This industry immersive course offers a unique opportunity to enhance your expertise, expand your professional network, and gain practical skills directly from leaders in your industry.

We live in a world surrounded by ever-increasing amounts of information in the form of data. Converting this raw data into a visual form that communicates effectively involves data analytics and information visualization. To use data to communicate effectively requires advanced information and visualization literacy. By the end of this course, you will have working knowledge of historical, cultural, social, economic, political, and ethical contexts of data analytics and visualizations. You will explore perspectives and research from the fields of art/design history, theory, and visual culture. Additionally, you will study the way visualization has been used historically, and is currently being used, in a variety of industries to tell compelling narratives.

To ensure your success in the program, students will meet virtually for a 1-day orientation where they will meet administrative staff, learn more about student services and success initiatives, and engage in community building with their cohort. In addition, students will complete an asynchronous orientation course in Canvas as a means to introduce them to the navigation of MICA’s administrative tools as well as inform them of academic services available through MICA. The content and assignments in the orientation course are designed to be an introduction to the program as well as a resource throughout the students' time at MICA.

This course teaches you how to create impactful information visualizations that will produce results. You will be introduced to the best practices in organizing space, using type and color based on well established guidance. Using universal principles of design, perception, and cognition. Core Skills / Software Applications: Adobe Illustrator, Gestalt laws & Universal principles of design

Building upon Visual Storytelling I, in this course students learn about different forms of storytelling and the ways in which techniques such as sequence, relationship, context, and audience can be combined through analysis and design strategies to tell a powerful story. Students continue to engage in the design process and apply principles of human-centered design. Additionally, through critique, students learn to refine information, data, and their design to strengthen and clarify a visual story.

This course introduces students to methods for gathering, organizing, preparing, and analyzing information and data that are central to visualization. Topics will include data types, data gathering, data cleaning, preparation, organization and exploratory summarizations. Students will explore tools and applications that help establish and/or understand descriptive statistical relationships such as range, centrality, histograms, distributions with data and information and develop foundational skills needed to transform research into visualizations. R (https://www.r-project.org/) is a free, open-source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R has an incredibly rich set of capabilities, and this course will focus on loading data, performing basic statistical operations, and producing graphical outputs.

The course provides an overview of probability and statistics concepts commonly used in the visualization process. You will learn to apply concepts such as statistical measures, correlation, and regression to data sets. You will continue to use and gain proficiency in tools and softwares introduced in Statistics and Analysis and explore additional methods for data analysis that apply to real-world challenges. Core Skills / Software Applications: R and RMarkdown, Perform more complex data manipulations required to generate visualizations.

This Independent Study will cover the usual content for the corresponding regular curriculum course, excepting minor adaptations to fit the student’s personalized needs and interests, and will use the same learning outcomes

This course integrates all the various concepts explored throughout the program and engages MICA's industry partners to present students with challenges faced by professionals in the Data Analytics and Visualization industry. You will engage with the project decision-making process, ethical uses of data and visualizations, project management, budget and risk management, user interface design, and testing. Additionally, you will use visualization applications to help execute business strategy and support communication with a wide variety of stakeholders. Data Analytics and Visualization professionals provide you feedback, insight, encouragement, and critical analysis as you execute your projects. The goal of this course is to serve as a cornerstone of your portfolio showcasing end-to-end design thinking.

This course is designed for a preliminary exploration of the capstone project. Students integrate the theories, methodologies, and skills acquired throughout the program to work from concept to proposal, which will then be developed into a fully-realized prototype at the end of the Capstone course next term. Throughout this course, students will also engage with the project decision-making process, ethical uses of data and visualizations, and project management. In addition, students will collaborate with peers, faculty, advisors, and other industry professionals for critique and guidance during the project development through the presentation of the capstone project proposal.

In this intensive course, students prepare a final thesis project from concept to a fully-realized product, using research and materials developed over the course of the program. Students work with a faculty advisor who provides guidance and critique for projects as well as provides guidance for the student presentations. For the presentation, students must describe their project process, including concept development, research and development documentation, and design.