MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — In October’s episode of Middle Tennessee State University’s “Out of the Blue” television magazine show, longtime School of Journalism and Strategic Media professor Ken Blake discusses the new online Digital Media master’s degree.

The fully online, accelerated degree launched in August is designed to accommodate those with a media background who want to take the next steps in their careers.

“Our students may have life circumstances that keep them from attending classes like a traditional two-year master’s student would in a traditional program. They’re working professionals, they’re taking care of their kids or maybe parents. We’ve got a range of folks in the program,” Blake said.

He continued, “We saw that as an untapped market. These are people who are interested in our in-person master’s program but really can’t afford the time investment that it would take. That’s the market we’re trying to reach with this.”

Watch Blake’s full interview below with program host and Division of Marketing and Communications Vice President Andrew Oppmann:

If attending full-time, a student can complete the program in a calendar year by taking three courses each semester, a winter session class and a couple of summer classes.

The Digital Media master’s degree is the first fully online, accelerated program offered in the Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment.

“It is aimed at people who are more professionally oriented. This degree will be more focused on digital skills, like search engine optimization, social media management and data analysis, which is the area I teach in,” Blake said.

He continued, “But along with that, you’re still going to get a pretty good dose of media theory and research methodology, so that if you did want to go on eventually and get a Ph.D., you could do that. But we also want to equip people with some of those immediate skills that they can use to up their game as a working media professional.”

Blake said all the courses are asynchronous, which means while there are deadlines to hit each week, like completing an assignment, watching lecture videos, reading articles and taking a quiz, students can do it on their own schedule.

“You work at your own pace, at your own time, on your own schedule, while the kids are asleep, after hours or on weekends. Each Friday at midnight, an assignment is due, and then we do it all over again the next week. That’s how the typical experience will be here,” he said.

Even though the degree is offered as an accelerated program, students don’t have to complete it in a single calendar year.

“We’ve got about a dozen people enrolled in this initial cohort, and they’re a fascinating group. They range from people fresh out of their undergraduate programs to people who have been working as media professionals here in the local market for 20-plus years. We have some really fantastic students,” he said. “The bulk of the students who are in our initial cohort are not on the one-year track. They’re taking maybe one class or maybe two classes.”

To learn more about the digital media master’s program, email Ken Blake at ken.blake@mtsu.edu.

You can also visit https://www.mtsu.edu/program/digital-media-m-s/ for more information.

To watch and listen

• “Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

• It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 and 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 6:30 p.m. Sundays; WKRN+ at 7 p.m. Thursdays and noon Sundays; via streaming on MTSU’s Jazz Network on WMOT HD2 and through WMOT.org at 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month; and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings.

• It is also available as a podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Music, iHeart and as individual interview segments on primary host Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3.

— DeAnn Hays (deann.hays@mtsu.edu)