Tag: Miscellaneous Teaching

Recently, I did a Marketing Management class, and I used PharmaSim. On the final day of class, I wrapped up the long exercise with a debrief discussion. With students, I walked through this list of the take-aways I wanted them to get from their PharmaSim experience: Continue reading “PharmaSim Take-aways”

Students often ask me for advice about getting a Ph.D in marketing. Fundamentally, the questions are …
(1) Should I pursue a Ph.D.?
(2) What school should I attend to pursue a Ph.D.?
Continue reading “Advice about pursuing a Ph.D. in marketing”

I am grateful and honored to have received a national award for teaching from the Marketing Management Association.  As part of the 11^th Annual Master Teacher Award Competition sponsored by Hormel Foods, the Marketing Management Association has awarded me with a 2013 Meritorious Teaching Award.

 
– Eric DeRosia

Over the years, I have developed my approach to teaching as a response to the academic literature on education.  Active learning (Bonwell and Eison 1991) has frequently been used in marketing education, and it has been shown to increase student engagement and learning (e.g., Hickman, Pearson, and Mundell 2011; Hawes 2004).  A common finding in the literature (e.g., Renkl et al. 2002) is that student learning is most improved if a principle is first taught in a traditional lecture format and then supported with an active learning exercise.  Indeed, many of the common active learning exercises (e.g., think-pair-share) are fundamentally based on the notion of bolstering the learning points already covered a lecture.  In essence, the findings in the literature suggest the best approach is to be consistent: teach the topic (with a lecture) and then give students practice on the topic (with active learning, problem sets, and so on).

Although I strongly support active learning exercises, I disagree with the suggestion that the order should be “learn then practice.”   Continue reading “My Approach to Teaching”

I view teaching as a creative endeavor in the sense that the teacher creates a learning setting for students, and the number of approaches that a teacher could use to teach a given topic is practically infinite.  To help me create a consistent environment that focuses on a single goal, I rely on a personal philosophy of teaching.  I have taught a variety of different classes, including marketing research (graduate), new media marketing (undergraduate), consumer behavior (graduate and undergraduate), marketing core (graduate), and marketing principles (undergraduate).  Throughout all these classes, I apply a teaching philosophy that is based on the simple observation that I teach at a school of business.  I draw inspiration from the words school and business. Continue reading “Teaching Philosophy”

The other day, I had two hours of one-on-one interviews I needed transcribed, and I hired CastingWords to do the task. Before I was a client, I only knew the broad outlines of how they use crowdsourcing (with Mechanical Turk as their broker between themselves and workers).  Once I became a client, I was curious, so I really dug into their process. I even did a few of their HITs as a worker to get a feeling for how they do things. I was really impressed by the way they partitioned the task into atomistic bits. I was also impressed by the clarity of their instructions and by their process of escalating levels of verification and review. Furthermore, I was impressed by the overall experience as a client, including an excellent transcript as the outcome. In terms of process, I submit CastingWords as a “best practices” example of how crowdsourcing can be used.  This guy is correct (a video I commissioned using crowdsourcing with Fiverr as the broker).

– Eric DeRosia

In Fall 2000, I was a young Ph.D. student teaching my second Marketing Principles class at the University of Michigan.  It was in that class that I created my first active learning exercise.  The “active learning” experience was so fascinating for me and so impactful for my students that I began to frequently incorporate active learning exercises into my traditional lectures.  I promised my students that semester that I would post the results of the exercise on the web, and they are still available here.

The learning objectives of the exercise were related to the social impact of advertising.  Advertising is often described (e.g., here) as misogynistic, with images that denigrate and mock women.  Denigrating women is undoubtedly problematic for an enlightened society. The question at hand is whether advertising, collectively as an industry, is at fault.  I wanted my students to directly consider whether this criticism of advertising is accurate.   Continue reading ““Women in Ads” Active Learning Exercise”

I keep myself organized while teaching many classes at once by putting a logo header at the top of everything I create.  I confess that my main motivation isn’t to “brand” each class with a unique identity in a marketing sense; I’m simply trying to keep all my documents straight.  These are the logos I currently use in rotation: Continue reading “Class Logos”

New marketing hires are often told things such as, “We have a list of people who requested a free trial subscription. Are any of them on our list of inactive customers? If so, we’d like to direct them to an enhanced offer.” The purpose of this active-learning assignment is to give students the skills necessary to perform list management tasks such as these using Microsoft Excel. The exercise uses Excel rather than relational databases for two reasons: (1) Excel is commonly available, and (2) Excel is powerful and flexible enough to accomplish these list management tasks, even for lists as large as one million people.

– Eric DeRosia

From the syllabus:

In this class, we take an expansive view of “new media” as anything digital, on-demand, and interactive.  This includes social media, wireless devices, video games, and a variety of other communication platforms.  We are interested in how firms can best take advantage of new media to satisfy customers.  In addition to identifying new methods for promotion, we are interested in new types of businesses and new types of marketing research that are made possible by new media.  Our interest encompasses established companies and entrepreneurial ventures. Continue reading “New Media Marketing — Syllabus, etc.”