Exploring the Divides Among Students, Educators, and Practitioners in the Use of Digital Media as a Pedagogical Tool

Abstract

Digital technologies pervade the higher education landscape as a way to build student engagement and enhance student learning and teaching. In practice, however, the ways in which these tools are implemented in marketing education appear to be ad hoc, rather than using a systematic approach to build engagement and provide students with the skill sets needed for 21st-century employment (including meta-skills, e.g., communication skills, critical thinking, technical skills in analytics, and understanding of connected consumer behavior). The research to date has built on the educator-student dyad. This article argues that an industry practitioner perspective also adds insight into how digital technology can rationally and purposefully be integrated into the marketing classroom. Using exploratory depth interviews with undergraduate students, educators, and industry practitioners, this article seeks to explore the emerging pedagogical challenges of representing these tripartite views in marketing module development and to provide recommendations for higher education institutions as to how best to do so.

Developing a Work‐Ready Social Media Marketing Analytics Course: A Model to Cultivate Data‐Driven and Multiperspective Strategy Development Skills

“…To summarize, the fact is that social media is impacting and will continue to impact every aspect of the business industry. Another fact is that universities are increasingly being expected to play the role of a service provider that trains and prepares students to be work-ready (Duffy & Ney, 2015;Loe & Inks, 2014;Taylor, Hunter, Melton, & Goodwin, 2011). Therefore, educators must develop curricula that align with emerging industry needs in order to help students become competitive in the job market (Brocato et al, 2015;Wymbs, 2011).…”

“…As social media becomes one of the most important communication channels, companies are increasingly incorporating social media as an integral part of their marketing strategy (Hood & Day, ), and employers are hiring Millennial marketing graduates, who are often labeled as tech‐savvy and socially active digital natives, with the expectation that they will be able to analyze social media data and transform it into usable knowledge (Bal, Grewal, Mills, & Ottley, ; Ross, ). However, while marketing students are proficient in using social media for social and entertainment purposes, most lack the training in using social media for solving real‐world marketing problems (Crittenden & Crittenden, ; Duffy & Ney, ). To compensate for the lack of analytically proficient marketing graduates, employers are increasingly hiring statistics and IT graduates for marketing analytics jobs (Harrigan & Hulbert, ).…”

“…Such shifts encourage students to engage in self‐regulated learning, which involves students taking responsibility to actively participate and engage in their educational learning experience and develop an ability to learn how to learn (Dowell & Small, ; Young, ). This can be especially beneficial in a social media course, where the fast‐paced changes occurring in the field intensify the workload for instructors in terms of maintaining up‐to‐date lectures and keeping up with new trends, technologies, and resources that are constantly being developed (Duffy & Ney, ; Muñoz & Wood, ) and students can be intimidated by the plethora of resources that are introduced. In such courses, fostering a collaborative learning environment where everyone is motivated to contribute and learn can be extremely helpful.…”

“…164 Developing a Work-Ready Social Media Marketing Analytics Course With data-driven decisions becoming more important, there is increasing demand for job candidates who are able to manage, analyze, and interpret large amounts of customer data (Hitt, Jin, & Wu, 2016;Shaw, 2014;Wedel & Kannan, 2016). Since an important role of marketing education is to contribute to marketing practice by developing curricula that reflect and align with practical needs of the marketplace (Brocato, White, Bartkus, & Brocato, 2015;Duffy & Ney, 2015) and provide adequately skilled marketing graduates (Harrigan & Hulbert, 2011;Walker et al, 2009), educators have been presented with the task of developing courses that effectively train students to use data to pull insights that can be incorporated into company strategies.…”

Developing and Implementing Instrumentation for Digital High School Curricula: A Regional Study of a Rubric for Instructional Quality

“…Accompanying this transition, the interest of expanding the impact and usefulness of digital resources that move beyond mere textual content to more media-rich and interactive learning materials has grown (Lombardi et al, 2017;Matuk, Linn, & Eylon, 2015). There are certainly reservations about immersing students in a completely digital learning environment (Dobler, 2015;Duffy & Ney, 2015;Toppin & Toppin, 2016), giving rise to a more balanced vision of blending learning experiences (Mirriahi, Alonzo, & Fox, 2015).…”