Academic Compression: An Ecological Examination of Programmatic Trends in Communication Education

The present article identified three common programmatic trends that higher education has been implementing widely across the United States to combat enrollment concerns: reduced credits, accelerated programs, and online, asynchronous course options. Key principles in the field of media ecology are introduced as a theoretical framework to explore how programmatic trends may alter skills learned by communication students, with special attention paid to educational technology and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that enable such programmatic trends. The article explores changes to the form of communication education, the communication skills learned by students, and how these changes and consequent skills contribute to the current state, as well as the future possibilities, for communication education.