WSE 455, Industrial Marketing in the Forest Sector, is a small enrollment course designed to orient students to both the theory and practice of industrial marketing within forest products companies. Students graduating from our program typically go into marketing or management within Oregon forest industry companies.
In its hybrid form, the course will meet face-to-face once per week for 50 minutes. Nearly half of these will be for visiting industry speakers with the remainder involving exercises, discussion, and student presentations. There are 3-6 online “lectures” for each of the ten weeks. Most of these are traditional lectures, but approximately five are short interviews with industry managers. Some lectures will include small quizzes that must be completed before proceeding with the remainder of the recording. Each week includes an online quiz. There will be only one exam in the course, a peer reviewed mid-term. Classroom experiences are designed to illustrate the principles explored in the online content for each week.
The culminating experience for the students is interaction with an industry mentor from which the student produces a description of “marketing practice” within the mentor’s firm. Output from this will be both a report and a recorded presentation. This is designed to illustrate how marketing theory and marketing practice differ.
This sounds like a great use of the online and face-to-face elements of the course. Can you tell us more about how you’re designing the weekly online lectures?
I love the idea of spending class time with industry leaders to give real world experience. I’ve found that those types of events really engage and excite students because it so concretely shows them how their education will benefit them later on. I wonder if some of those visits could happen online as well, in order to bring visitors from outside the area?
I also have plans for “guest” speakers for the online portion of the class = that will be in the form of interviews with those experts. I zoomed in a colleague from Rome last zoomllfall and it worked fine. If we go online this fall, all of the guest speakers would visit via Zoom….