Teaching with Technology

Fred l. Miller, Terence L. Holmes, W.Glynn Mangold

Marketing Education Review, Vol 17, No 3 (Fall 2007)

 Blog: Lynn Barnsback

As of this writting (2007) Geographic Information System application is not an integral part of the Marketing Curriculum. As is often the case, new technologies are slow to be integrated into higher education’s curriculums. This study was a test really of a modular design for integrating GIS into marketing curriculums.

 GIS “combines demographic, socioeconomic and business data with mapping and graphical display capabilities”. It is a very useful tool for market area analysis, site selection, sales territory analysis customer profiling, routing and real time logistic planning. There are a number of reasons that GIS, although becoming increasingly more important to business, is not taught in-depth in marketing classes. These include:

1. high cost for hardware/software
2. faculty learning curve
3. lack of instructional resources
4. Lack of enough time in an individual class.

In order to confront these barriers, the authors developed seven modules that can be incorporated individually into a series of marketing classes and tackled the barriers for inclusion.

 First (1.), they found a software provider and established licensing agreements that can be accessed by hundreds of universities, thus eliminating the software costs. Students can even install the operating system on their personal computers. (2) By breaking it into modules Instructors only need to acquire the skills that are relevant to their class or specific modal. The Modules are: Retailing, e-commerce & Marketing Research, Sales Management, Integrated Marketing Communications, Consumer Behavior.)  A Module Designer (3) is designated to customize datasets, basemaps and other project materials. By doing so, the burden on the rest of the faculty is lessened. By spreading the GIS instruction across several courses, the constraint of time is eliminated (4). While designed to be completed in a one week time frame students can work in a class or independently on the tasks, however an instructor chooses. Because the modules are stand alone, only the ones a department deems necessary need be included.

 The materials were designed as a printed work book and CD. The same workbook is used for each module, thus building upon the knowledge. “Each of the seven modules uses the same format but requires a different analytical focus and the performance of different GIS tasks.” 

The final reported is completed in steps while going through each exercise.

 The exercises were assessed favorably although all acknowledged deed that even broken out into modules, they took a lot of time to complete. Textbook knowledge both about GIS and other marketing principals was applied to the tasks. Analytical and problem solving skills were further developed and even computer skills enhanced. The final report provided them an opportunity to develop written communication skills and experiment with maps, graphs & PowerPoint.

 CONCLUSION: There is an opportunity cost to integrating the GIS modules into a marketing curriculum-time taken to do the modal is time taken away from other projects or topics. Also achieving proficiency with design is time consuming and must be addressed as a department if one person is to be primarily responsible for the implementation. At the time of writing not all the modules had been tested, however it appears that the concept holds as successful. While I like the approach, especially exposing students to such a “real life” hands on project, I wonder about the need for such an in-depth project. It almost seems that to make the investment of faculty time worthwhile, the project must be done in multiple modules through several courses. I would be interested in learning the impact on teaching the GIS as just a stand alone modal in one class. Is the mutli class approach really necessary to understand its impact? Wouldn’t students be better served with several different projects over the course of their education rather than revisiting the same concept – just with different tasks??