Welcome to Serious Business

Welcome to Serious Business at UNBC. Here's the idea: I taught COMM 346 (Internet Marketing) last year, as a new course, with a big clunky textbook, and it was booooooring. This year I'm using a small, opinionated book so we have something to discuss instead of just blasting out PowerPoints and memorizing definitions from slides. Meanwhile, I made this blog so that my students have a play ground for some hands on learning about how the web works.

Ideally, this blog will have many authors, and not just students from my Internet Marketing class. I'm hoping to get some involvement from students in other courses that I teach, and even the Commerce Student Society.

I could have made a place for discussion on Blackboard, but that would be a closed discussion. Instead, I want to pull in commentary from students in other courses, and maybe even from some other faculty members.

It's my opinion that marketing should be taught in an applied manner. Students should get hands on practice working with marketing tools and in the case of a blog, producing materials for consumption. An Internet Marketing course offers great potential to employ problem based learning with ill defined problems, and that's what I intend to do.

Honestly, students can teach themselves an Internet Marketing course with youtube, wikipedia and Wired. I don't see my role as standing at the front of the room and rattling off terminology with painfully obvious definitions. Instead, my role should be to facilitate students' genuine learning by giving them an environment to safely experiment in, help them find resources, and offer some advice as they produce real (as real as the Internet gets) products and watch how the world (wide web) reacts.

Let's get to work.