guest article by Scott Cowley
Today’s great news is that you’re in the Golden Age of teaching resources. The bad news is that you don’t magically know what all of those resources are, or which is best for a particular situation. In this article are a couple of helpful sources I’ve used to take something I have to teach to a new level (or a more relevant one):
1. BuzzFeed Challenge
There are many platforms that can help you teach any topic more effectively, whether it be services or consumer behavior or analytics. Last year, I created the BuzzFeed Valentine Challenge to help me teach marketing strategy in a more holistic way, using a popular entertainment publishing platform. This project helps students learn how to “hypertarget” a desired market segment by publishing and promoting clickbait on BuzzFeed during the week leading up to Valentine’s Day (works fine with other holidays or none at all). Since then, more than 20 universities have adapted it.
Each student must also produce a strategic promotion plan, including the identification of relevant channels, influencers, and entities to aid diffusion. Students all publish their BuzzFeed posts on the same day, a week before Valentine’s Day, and execute their promotion plans to drive at least 1,000 pageviews in a week (a high enough goal to discourage mere “click-begging” from friends) for max credit. BuzzFeed’s built-in author analytics provide students with real-time feedback about their own performance so that they can modify plans to reach the goal. At the conclusion of the promotion period, students assess their own campaign outcomes compared to their strategies and provide personal takeaways along with screenshots of their analytics as proof of performance.
You find all the material and resources including assignment sheet, teaching notes, and tips on my website.
2. Slideshare Reports
When it comes to creating a brand new project or assignment, I typically take whatever professors usually do, and just try to inject more relevance, realism, and skill-building into it, often using digital platforms to make deliverables public. Is the student going to turn in a written report on a company? Instead, I’ll have them put the same info into a well-designed PowerPoint slide deck that they have to optimize and upload to Slideshare. There, others can view it and I can easily share a link to it with a company executive if it makes sense. It takes the same amount of work as a report, but the potential upside for the student is much bigger.
3. Facebook Teaching Group
The Teaching Resources for Marketing Educators Facebook Group. With nearly 3,000 global members, you can ask a narrow question and get several suggestions. Need a good video to teach service design? That’s the type of information that you’ll be able to answer much faster with crowd wisdom than by searching YouTube. The community there is always helpful and friendly. Try to give as much as you get.
4. Smart Google Search
Gather a collection of syllabi. Google will deliver a plethora of syllabi for you to skim through if you know how to search efficiently. Try or modify this query [filetype:pdf services marketing syllabus] and you’ll get pages and pages of PDF syllabi used at different institutions that you can use for inspiration (I also like to include the current or previous year in my search so that I narrow it down to current syllabi). Don’t forget the SERVSIG Service Research Syllabi Collection (and contribute your own syllabus to the database ;-).
If I had two wishes, they would be that
(1) we could do a lot more to bring our students’ work out into the public sphere where they can gain real market validation and experiences, and
(2) we could similarly be outgoing about packaging and publicizing our own teaching approaches for the benefit of our peers.
There are many people doing incredibly innovative things in their classrooms that we all stand to benefit from if we catch a bit more of the “sharing vision.”
Scott Cowley
is Assistant Professor of Marketing
at Western Michigan University
Photo: Sage Ross, CC BY-SA 3.0
