Online Master's Degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs (MSE)

Credits: 3

Description: This leadership-focused course is designed to provide understanding of intercultural communications within organizational settings. It explores the role of effective communication in leadership, equipping students to navigate and influence diverse cultural environments across institutions. The course blends theory with practical applications to develop advanced communication strategies for interacting and leading within varied cultural contexts.

Credits: 3

Description: This course is designed to prepare graduate level counselor trainees to facilitate career and life planning decisions within an applied professional setting. Typical theoretical perspectives associated with career development and life-planning counseling will be highlighted. Career development program planning, organization, implementation, administration, and evaluation will be addressed. Assessment instruments and techniques associated with career planning and decision-making will be explored. Technology-based career development applications and strategies, including computer-assisted career guidance information will be utilized. This class will include such topics as foundations and resources, career-counseling programs for special populations, and techniques for career-counseling interviewing. Career development program planning, organization, implementation, administration, and evaluation will be addressed. Ethical issues associated with career counseling will be considered in detail.

Credits: 3

Description: This course explores human growth and development with emphasis on neurobiological processes relevant to counseling practice. It is designed to prepare graduate level counselor trainees to apply relevant principles of human transformation within an applied professional setting. A presentation of personality dynamics and behavioral manifestations at critical psychosocial stages of development over the lifespan will be provided based on a Neuro-Bio-Psycho-Social perspective. Cultural implications related to human development will be explored in detail as well as outlining impact of diverse systems on human development.

Credits: 3

Description: An introduction to student services in higher education: history, purpose, policies, and legal and ethical issues specific to higher education. Overview of developmental theories, settings and characteristics of college students and their interaction with campus and community influences including technology integration to student services.

Credits: 3

Description: Unique needs of higher education are explored including organizational culture, budgeting/finance, and personnel practices. Models of programs to meet these needs are examined. Development of essential leadership skills and competencies of student affairs professionals are described. Identification and exploration of applicable interventions across the higher education settings are explored for effective student and program outcomes. 

Credits: 3

Description: Beginning graduate students will develop a practical knowledge and application of basic types of research, as well as basic research tools and skills that will be helpful to them throughout their program. Graduate students will create a research plan and write a review of literature (paper). Students will create appropriate survey and interview questions, develop a beginning understanding of educational statistics, and the process for developing a research proposal including Institutional Review Board requirements and application processes.

Select four of the following courses for a total of 12 credit hours:

• BUS 628 Dispute Resolution Management (3 credits) - This course is designed to give students an overview of alternative dispute resolution. Students will explore negotiations, a process that helps individuals and organizations settle disputes. Students will examine their personal style of management and their unique approach to conflict. This course uses case studies, simulations and role-playing to explore concepts of interests, collaboration, mediation, and nonverbal communications. Students will grow in their ability to anticipate the needs of their audience.
   
• BUS 665 Leadership Seminar (3 credits) - This course provides students with context and background for the consideration of leadership from multiple perspectives. The course explores leadership theory and practice. Special emphasis is placed on the translation of theory into practice. The evolution of leadership thought, situational leadership, and the future of leadership are also explored.
   
• CJA 652 Drugs and Society (3 credits) - Comprehensive analysis of the interrelationships among drug use/abuse, crime, and justice. The course will examine historical and contemporary policies, drug markets, drug trafficking, and drug offender arrests, as well as prosecution and sentencing of drug offenders by the state and federal courts.
   
• EDU 626 Advanced Educational Psychology (3 credits) - A study of theories of learning and motivation, conditions and processes of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning; personal qualities of a teacher; the teaching process, classroom management; teaching the exceptional learner; and the role of evaluation in learning and teaching.
   
• EDU 627 Current Issues and Trends in Education (3 credits) - This course offers intensive study of specific issues and trends that have direct impact upon education. Individuals will choose a topic to examine in breadth and depth. It presents a comprehensive approach to the exploration of the selected topics. The course offers opportunities for the students to examine relevant topics affecting education in breadth and depth.
   
• PED 685 Social Issues in Sport (3 credits) - This course is designed to examine the various ways issues such as politics, economics, education, the mass media, gender, race, and financial compensation intertwine with sport in the United States.
   
• SOC 515 The Family (3 credits) - Study of the basic social unit: socialization processes, love, marriage, parental roles, conflict, and divorce, within a historical and cultural perspective.
   
• SOC 560 Social Inequalities (3 credits) - The course explores the development and maintenance of systems social stratification historically and in contemporary global society. It focuses on the effects of social class inequality and relationship to social change. In doing so, it also includes the intersection of inequalities based on race/ethnicity, gender, and age.
   
• PSY 544 Topics in Psychology (3 credits) - Current or special issues in Psychology will be examined. The course offers students the opportunity to discuss relevant issues facing society.