Is anyone studying some kind of PR 101 course?

Time to visit Dr. Google! Do a search for some key terms about PR (in quotes) and also add .ppt to your search terms. That should find a few places to start. These ones looks like they have some basic stuff: http://www.slideshare.net/Brett509/p...-a-pr-campaign 202.205.89.79/download/materials/2007f/.../ch19%5B1%5D.ppt

I'm in PR-203 and had my second class this morning. I don't know about your lecture style, but my class (about 38 people) seemed to respond best to the more interactive and debate styled sections of the lecture. My lecturer (some guy fom Satchi and Satchi) gave up the interactivity about half way through and the last hour nearly killed us.

When I had my first PR class as part of a business major our big final project was to find a find a company with a PR disaster, analyze what they did wrong, and make a plan to make things right. The project included a large report, and a pretty long presentation.

The other alternative was to do a large case report on something. This is what I did. I did mine on the failed Nokia N-Gage and the absolutely horrid PR associated with it. Other students who did the above chose things like a Tylenol recall, Pepsi cans that were rumored to be poisoned, ect....

The worst part of the class was when we had some publishing guest speakers who showed us slide after slide of grids they used to make magazine layouts.

The best part of the class was the teacher not being a teacher by trade at all. She was just some woman who had been working in PR her whole life and got a job teaching less than a year before I took the class. It was great to have her reference something very dry from the text book or ppt, then raise her head and name off all these real world projects she was either involved in and knew about that related to it. It really brought the class to life.

I'll also add I made my first massive academic mistake in this class. I completely missed the final exam. She specifically said there would be no make-up exams on the syllabus. After a gracious phone message and a email, I was able to sweet talk my way into having her forgive it. The reason I bring this up is that I used what she taught me about crisis management in everything I said and wrote, so I ended up not failing the class despite my very stupid mistake.

What she taught me had a very clear practical use, which is so much more than I can say for any other class.

I work part time with a upcomine company that does marketing and I would love to get my hands on some material, unfortunatly I don't think my current university offers any, well at least I haven't heard of any but I haven't looked either lol. Did you ever find any material?

Have you considered basing your curriculum off a textbook? I don't know what you get over there, but have a look through: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss...tions+textbook and see if the tables of index for various books can guide you.

Isn't there an MIT Open Web course on PR? Or some sort of other free online course that you could get some ideas from?

Matt, this might not be helpful, but its what I have - I took one advertising class, a long time ago, and the structure was how to use your advertising budget. basically a course for marketing people within a company on how to use your advertising money with an agency, to understand how the agency works and how they will spend your money. I found it very helpful. it looked at different aspects of advertising from a cost/benifit analysis.