دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی ترکیب سنتی و پیشرفته در آموزش بازاریابی با استراتژی توسعه شایستگی هرمنوتیک - الزویر 2018

abstract

Tertiary educators are concerned about the causes of dwindling class attendance, while employers and educators alike call for work-ready, entry-level graduates who can apply theories in the workplace and who are socially skilled, self-driven, interactive and independent learners. Various progressive adult teaching practices (andragogy) have been proposed to supplement traditional lecture-based methods, but studies have not yet investigated a combined strategy of methods within a particular marketing topic. The present study uses a single marketing topic, sensory marketing, to compare and test seven experiential delivery methods, designed to improve the engagement of business students through increased enjoyment, increased perceived understanding, and their own perceptions of improved ability to use higher order thinking skills to apply the complex concepts of consumer behavior to real-world scenarios. Additionally, strategically combining these individual methods, this research project, consisting of two empirical studies, proposes a new strategy to deliver knowledge skills and attributes. This strategy is carefully linked to prior understanding, scaffolded by peer support and practitioner advice, and ultimately aimed at applying the knowledge to real-world phenomena. In study 1 we found that students rated teacher-led discussions highest of the methodologies used to explain concepts and theories. Small group discussions were rated low across all domains; enjoyment, understanding and theory application. Integrating the individual methods, this research develops and proposes a new teaching strategy, named the hermeneutic competency development strategy (HCD). In study 2 we found that the proposed HDC strategy was successful in achieving the preset objectives of shaping students into work-ready graduates that have the ability to (1) apply (theoretical) knowledge, (2) are able to think independently and critically, (3) possess specialized knowledge, and (4) have the honed inter-personal skills and enhanced ability to communicate effectively in business English. The HCD strategy shifted attitudes, orientation and learner behavior. This empirical study thus contributes to a better understanding of the value of flipped classrooms and blended learning from the students’ perspective, and improved clarity regarding the ability of various andragogies to deliver on both educators’ and practitioners’ demands for future-ready marketing students. Last, we outline an easy-to-follow route map for applying the proposed HCD teaching strategy.

Key results and conclusion

Lecturers in higher education have always used different teaching methods with the aim of providing the best possible learning platform for their students. In this study we used some of the most commonly applied methods in a real classroom for one topic, allowing us to compare those methods and making this study very relevant to the debate on optimizing teaching processes. At the end of the teaching task students were asked to evaluate all teaching methods in terms of liking, perceived effectiveness in terms of understanding the theories and perceived effectiveness in terms of understanding the applications. What we found was quite intriguing. Firstly, our results emphasise the importance of the lecturer/professor in the classroom. Not only did students like teacher-lead discussions, they further rated the lecture input as effective in terms of understanding of theories and application of theoretical concepts to real-world scenarios and real-world application of learned theories and models. The results show that a ‘theory’-based expert is able to make applications to the real world understandable to students. This is an important observation, since educators and students often consider marketing an applied subject. Second, this study emphasised the importance of self-study, a method not particularly liked by many students. However, as our results confirmed, students still find self-study crucial in terms of understanding theory as well as applications, highlighting the importance of assignments where facilitated self-study is included in the learning programme. Further, despite the call by some scholars to facilitate small group discussions, in line with the work of Tiberius (2013), our results clearly indicated that students did not value this method very highly, with relatively low ratings across all aspects. A final interesting observation is that industry guest speakers did not add as much to the perceived learning of applications as one might expect. Perhaps this was due to the inability of guest speakers to relate the applications back to the taught concepts and theories.