Designing Experiential Learning Projects for Teaching Marketing Courses

Business schools are putting more emphasis on the improvement of teaching and learning methods to better prepare their graduates and meet the industry demands. This improvement has been sought through the use of face to face teaching approach blended with industry projects and experiential exercises. This study reports on a similar effort initiated in teaching the international marketing course in an undergraduate business program. An experiment is conducted in which a combination of face to face classroom and experiential learning project is used. Through this experiment, the author describes a semester-long, international marketing project that is structured to elicit active student engagement with international marketing course material and promote hands-on, real-world experience. Students learning enhanced tremendously as reflected in their papers and reports. The managers of the participating firms also appreciated the students’ efforts. The participating firms benefited by getting objective views of some of their international marketing problems and issues. Keywords-Experiential Learning; International Marketing; Industry Projects; Face-to-Face Lectures. Relevance to Marketing Educators, Researchers and/or PractitionersThe exercise can be appropriate for a variety of undergraduate marketing courses and is especially beneficial in teaching international marketing. Instructors can promote better students satisfaction and consequently achieve good scores in student evaluations that are very crucial in decision regarding the promotion and tenure. Overall, this course delivery format is an attempt to meet the industry demands currently confronting marketing educators.