MSC Online is a fully online graduate experience designed for working professionals who want to continue building momentum while earning a master’s degree. Through a structured , yet flexible format, students strengthen their ability to communicate strategically, navigate change, and lead effectively while continuing to work and grow professionally.
Build lasting career momentum through Northwestern’s MS in Communication— a program that blends leadership development, strategic communication, and a powerful community.
Study from wherever you live and work through a fully online experience designed to fit alongside professional and personal responsibilities.
Apply what you're learning immediately in your current role while continuing to gain experience, pursue new opportunities, and advance professionally.
A lock-step curriculum and focused five-week learning blocks provide a clear pathway to degree completion.
Advance through the program alongside a cohort of professionals from diverse organizations, industries, and geographic locations.
Throughout the program, students complete a three-part practicum sequence focused on applying communication concepts to real-world professional challenges. These live-virtual experiences allow students to strengthen skillstheir skills while connecting coursework directly to workplace situations.
Strengthen how you communicate your expertise, leadership approach, and professional value.
Explore emerging communication challenges and opportunities created by artificial intelligence and evolving workplace technologies.
Develop communication strategies that support career development, workplace influence, and long-term professional success.
The MSC Weekend curriculum combines foundational communication and leadership coursework with flexible elective options that allow students to connect graduate study directly to their professional goals. he program emphasizes practical application, helping students bring workplace challenges into the classroom and new ideas back into their organizations.
Program Structure:
This action-oriented course builds participants’ collaborative leadership skills. Through a series of case studies, activities, and projects, students learn how to effectively lead collaboration among teams. The course explores the specific challenges associated with leading teams, including: building and designing teams, managing information exchange within and across teams, structuring effective group decision processes, igniting creative thinking, enabling complex problem solving, and managing team conflict.
This course explores the new foundations of strategic communication, beginning with stakeholder identification and assessment. It then explores cases that demonstrate the ways the ways that external stakeholders can and should influence organizational processes and practices. Next it turns to cases that demonstrate how internal organizational processes and practices impinge on traditional public relations strategy. Finally, this class uses authentic corporate social responsibility communication as an ideal case that unites both forces.
In this course, students study the use, collection, analysis, and application of information in organizational planning and decision-making. Particular attention is given to sampling methods, survey methodology, social media/website analytics, and focus groups. The goal is to produce students who make informed decisions when presented with organizational and market research.
In the age of big data, we increasingly need ways to present that data to persuade, inform, educate, and understand large volumes of information. Information design is an interdisciplinary field that tells us the stories of data, helping us to understand our increasingly complex world and share our conclusions with others. “Information” can be expanded beyond traditional data. Charts and visualizations to the information of physical spaces, software interfaces, publication design, and dashboards for diverse disciplines. While information design borrows from diverse fields like psychology, statistics, cartography, cognitive science, visual design and human machine interaction, there are a series of basic principles that make up the foundations of the field. At the conclusion of the class, students will have a solid understanding of how to secure and prepare data for visualization, how to choose a relevant visual framework to represent that data, and how to use principles of visual design to maximize comprehension, retention and appeal of those designs.
The course provides a general introduction to the social scientific study of persuasive message design, emphasizing message, source, receiver, and contextual factors that either enhance or attenuate the effectiveness of strategic messaging. The course covers key factors that underlie human behavior change and discusses the ways in which behavioral change can be measured, analyzed, and validated. The larger purpose of the course is to provide a toolkit for thinking about how to influence behaviors through effective messaging. Additionally, students will put knowledge into practice, by completing an original research project that tests the effectiveness of a particular persuasive message.
This course provides students with the concepts, insights, and techniques that will give them a competitive edge as they discover, diagnose and design networks. The course offers a set of strategic principles for students to create, maintain and dissolve network ties. These principles vary depending on a student’s desire to explore innovations, engage in entrepreneurship, exploit existing resources, implement change, or mobilize strategic partnerships. The course will identify the optimal principles in these diverse contexts using a set of case studies, review articles and computer-based visual-analytic demonstrations. By the end of the course, students will have the conceptual tools and techniques to assess an existing network and rewire them to achieve any desired individual or organizational goal.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 generative AI has proliferated throughout society, capturing the imagination of the public with its potential to upend much of how people create and consume media and information. In this course we’ll demystify this new technology, understand how it works, how to control it through prompting, and how to implement it in various use cases found in media production and communication. We’ll also step back with a critical eye to ask questions of how generative AI changes the larger media system and raises ethical and governance issues around data, copyright, privacy, bias, and more.
This course is an exploration of the ways in which communication can be more effectively used to exert influence and to exercise power — bringing together a variety of disciplines including rhetorical analysis, leadership theory, composition, speechwriting, and public speaking. The goal is to help students understand how the beliefs and behaviors of decision-makers and publics can be influenced by effective communication.
Lead with Purpose from Day One is a foundational seminar designed to help graduate students enter their program with intention, clarity, and a strong professional presence. Through guided reflection and interactive exercises, students will begin shaping a personal brand that highlights their unique strengths, leadership potential, and ability to navigate complex challenges. Emphasizing purposeful communication, strategic thinking, and collaborative leadership, this seminar equips participants to position themselves as professionals ready to make an impact across industries. Whether aspiring to lead in business, nonprofits, or innovation-driven fields, students will leave with a compelling narrative that sets them apart from day one.
Work today is being reshaped by artificial intelligence–whether in how we draft messaging, analyze information, or coordinate across teams. For leaders, the challenge is not mastering technical detail but guiding conversations about AI that influence workplace culture, build trust, and increase productivity.
This seminar introduces a practical framework for AI-mediated communication and builds essential leadership competencies: asking sharper questions about when and where AI belongs in workflows, recognizing the human choices embedded in AI systems, and facilitating discussions about evaluating opportunities and risks. Through cases, structured research frameworks, and interactive exercises, students will develop a personalized playbook that equips them to communicate AI with clarity, confidence, and credibility in their own organizations.
This practicum offers a chance to revisit and refine the personal brand you began shaping in the Personal Branding Workshop. With a year of growth behind you, you’ll now be able to elevate that brand with new language, deeper insights, and clear evidence of your evolution as a leader.
The value of MSC Online is not tied to a single job title or career path. Students develop capabilities that apply across industries, organizations, and leadership levels, helping them remain adaptable, relevant, and prepared as their careers continue to evolve.
“The MSC program was at once edifying and enlightening, beefing up existing skills and challenging with new approaches. This has had an immediate impact on how I do my daily work and it also has provided me with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to embrace more specialized pursuits when I leave corporate life and set out on my own.”
Head of Community Responsibility/President & CEO
MassMutual Foundation
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MSC Online helps professionals continue growing without putting their careers on pause, offering a flexible path to develop relevant capabilities while balancing work, life, and long-term career goals.
