guest article by Volker G. Kuppelwieser
When it comes to teaching, we see an undisputable pressure to online teaching. Recognizing this trend, back in the days, my business school wanted the faculty to teach in front of a camera, record our teaching, and upload it somewhere. More recently, they offered to substitute or combine those “old-fashioned” face-to-face teaching hours with online teaching hours and called it blended learning. Apparently (and kind of contrary to the definition), the business school does not require us to be present or online during those dedicated online sessions.
Hearing this offer sounded like a good idea to me as a professor. Teaching the fundamentals of service marketing online, building on the students’ (online) knowledge, and discussing more complex service marketing models, context, or theories seemed promising. I initially thought about previous efforts in blended teaching. I remember Ray Fisk’s ideas on how to teach, Jochen Wirtz’s YouTube Channel, or Christian Grönroos and Gustav Medberg’s MOOC course (please forgive me if I did not mention your efforts here). I next asked the evil google about videos or online sessions in service marketing – well, the result was grounding me again to say at least. What I found was a couple of YouTube videos, some of them well done, others incredibly awkward, mostly by students or some strange abbreviations. I was, apparently falsely, expecting that some in our community have produced noticeable self-explaining material, like for example Sabine Benoit’s wonderful videos about research results.
I need to admit that my understanding of such courses might seem a bit odd. Besides the students’ interest and motivation to follow online courses, I can see the economic benefit for the institution in cost reductions. As a professor though, I do not see why I should make myself superfluous and hand teaching over to a few lines of code (aka software), allow the business school to upload my teaching somewhere on the web, and become reproducible every time and everywhere. This totally misses my idea of being an interactive teacher with an individual teaching style. I still remember my professors’ specific teaching style when I was a master student. I don’t know if this is and was part of my education, but I would not like to miss it.
As a scholar, I can see the benefits of not being forced to teach the boring fundamental stuff anymore. I can see how courses can enhance with online content. In the business school, I provide a quantitative research methods course in blended learning style. Half of the course is online, the other half face-to-face. It works fine and is interesting for students. The online parts are blends of exercises from teaching books, YouTube videos, and other scholars teaching material. It is easy for this subject because obviously, the online course is an application like SPSS and the face-to-face part is theory and statistics.
Long story short, as a service marketing community we need to respond to the need of our institution and the students. Moreover, we should maybe ease our lives and find a way how to use the online environment to our (teaching) advantage. I would love to have excellent material and provide service marketing courses to my students.
But, is the content of service marketing courses so special that we are unable to provide online teaching material on a higher education level? Or are we as professors and as a community already providing such material and nobody knows about it? Are we as individuals imply selfishly and do not provide the material to others? Thus, online sessions in service marketing are still cases?
I would love to see a thriving discussion on how to teach service marketing nowadays. Do we teach it online, offline, or a combination of both? Which is the best way of doing, what are good examples of online (blended) teaching materials?
Volker G. Kuppelwieser
NEOMA Business School
France
Photo: https://www.swiftelearningservices.com/blended-learning-solutions/
