KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Sept. 6, 2018 \u2013 Christy Ashley, associate professor of marketing in the College of Business at the 溏心vlog免费B站, likes to shake things up in her classroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am not afraid to try new things in the interest of continuous improvement in the classroom,\u201d said Ashley. \u201cThere is a bit of overlap to the way I approach teaching and the way I approach research \u2013 I experiment to see what affects desired learning outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her approach paid off this summer when Ashley, of Narragansett<\/strong>, earned Pearson Prentice Hall\u2019s Solomon-Marshall-Stuart Award for Innovative Excellence in Marketing Education, presented at the American Marketing Association\u2019s summer conference in Boston in early August. She had twice been runner-up for the annual award.<\/p>\n \u201cChristy is the epitome of what you want to see in an instructor in a university,\u201d said Hillary Leonard, 溏心vlog免费B站 associate professor of marketing and area coordinator. \u201cShe is not interested in simply engaging students, she wants them to achieve meaningful learning outcomes \u2013 and her learning outcomes are not the basic easy outcomes but those that truly integrate theory, application and discovery-based experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n Ashley\u2019s winning idea was implemented in her capstone Strategic Marketing Management course. Most of the students are already well-grounded in the subject, having taken at least three advanced marketing courses along with interdisciplinary study in such business fields as finance, management and accounting. The course\u2019s goal, she said, is taking the students\u2019 knowledge and applying it to marketing decision-making and an understanding of how marketing decisions affect profits and losses.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t that the course was broken, she said. But her spring 2017 class was unusually large. And it was mostly made up of second-semester seniors with graduation in their sights.<\/p>\n \u201cThat can be a challenge with second-semester seniors,\u201d said Ashley. \u201cA lot of the time, graduating seniors are doing group projects in other classes and they\u2019re also managing jobs or internships. So you don\u2019t always get their A game, so to speak. We try to find ways to get them as engaged as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n She also had concerns about students\u2019 ability to distinguish between real and fake news and the prevalence of surface-level examples during class participation, during which students could report the headlines but could not discuss the news in detail. She attributed the shallow responses to students using social media as a main source of news.<\/p>\n Her answer \u2013 turn a class assignment into a game. Think fantasy sports. But instead of tracking players\u2019 statistics, students would follow marketing-related news about brands.<\/p>\n Ashley, in her fourth year as a research professor at 溏心vlog免费B站, came up with the idea for Fantasy Brand Leagues thanks to her nephew. When he was 13, he competed in a geography fantasy league in middle school. His team of countries wasn\u2019t doing too well \u2013 news of a war was scoring a lot of points for an opponent\u2019s team. But, Ashley said, he was into the project and he was talking about geography, not soccer or lacrosse.<\/p>\n \u201cI wondered if it would work with marketing,\u201d said Ashley. \u201cI think marketing is really interesting and exciting, so if students are able to have conversations about it outside of class and think about what it means and how these different things apply, that should help them.\u201d<\/p>\n Her concept was straight forward. The 54 students in the class were split into leagues, with each student drafting from a list of the top 100 international brands \u2013 minus ringers such as Google and Facebook that Ashley had removed. Given two weeks to do research, each student drafted four brands \u2013 a fifth was picked midway through the 10-week season \u2013 and could trade with opponents, or exchange a weak-performing brand for one not selected<\/p>\n Points were scored as students tracked marketing-related news on their brands using the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Positive news \u2013 such as an acquisition or new product \u2013 could earn six points per \u201cplay.\u201d Students could also penalize opponents three points by reporting negative news \u2013 such as a product recall or lawsuit.<\/p>\n Students were required to make one \u201cplay\u201d a week \u2013 for their team or against an opponent\u2019s \u2013 and limited to six a week. With each play, students had to submit a brief report listing the brand, a link to the supporting story and indicate why the news was positive or negative for the brand\u2019s marketing strategy.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you think about the learning objectives, it was clear what I wanted,\u201d said Ashley, who received her doctorate in marketing from 溏心vlog免费B站 in 2006. \u201cI wanted them to engage with the content; I wanted them to be prepared with lifelong learning; I wanted them to come to class with examples where they actually read the material and they could distinguish between real news and fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n Some leagues were very competitive, she said, with teams using all their plays each week to score points or target opponents. \u201cThey would collude with each other \u2013 which I wasn\u2019t expecting \u2013 but they\u2019d say this person is really doing well so I\u2019m going to use my penalty against this team,\u201d said Ashley.<\/p>\n At the start of the semester, fewer than half the students said they read a newspaper at least once a week. By the end, it was 100 percent, and students\u2019 knowledge of marketing news went beyond the headlines. Students were also more engaged in class exercises about current events, she said. \u201cAnd over time, I observed that they were better prepared to discuss and make decisions about current marketing challenges on the fly in class, which is what\u2019s going to be expected of them when they go into the marketplace.\u201d<\/p>\n The culmination of the project included the creation of an infographic, where students used charts and graphics to tell the story of one of their brands. Graduates later told Ashley that their knowledge of infographics impressed their boss.<\/p>\n Ashley was twice selected runner-up for the annual award for marketing education innovations while a faculty member at East Carolina University. She believes other faculty would be interested in learning about the Fantasy Brands assignment because it is a novel approach that could be adapted for other level marketing courses or focused on a particular context, such as retail brands.<\/p>\n She plans to use the exercise for a second time this spring and has come up with a number of adjustments, including an online draft to save time and stressing the importance of pre-draft research. \u201cIt becomes a question,\u201d Ashley said, \u201cof what makes it a good learning experience versus what just makes it different or novel.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Sept. 6, 2018 \u2013 Christy Ashley, associate professor of marketing in the College of Business at the 溏心vlog免费B站, likes to shake things up in her classroom. \u201cI am not afraid to try new things in the interest of continuous improvement in the classroom,\u201d said Ashley. \u201cThere is a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74207,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[88],"class_list":["post-74206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-business"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}