Abstract:

Recently, the teaching environment as we know it has changed considerably. In the last decades, the only teaching alternative was a face-to-face classroom experience where the professor came in and delivered a dissertation or lecture on the topic of the day. However, today’s classrooms are often virtual, and education can be not only traditional, but also blended or fully online.

In order to teach effectively in these new environments, professors have adopted a variety of pedagogical and didactic strategies, and innovative technologies to enable better teaching, Moreover, no single learning environment will sufficiently meet all students needs, and many instructors employ various learning technologies alongside traditional methods particularly in a blended learning program, which combines e-learning and traditional teaching methods.

E-learning and blended learning are gaining particular presence in higher education. For example, the main objective of a specific blended learning is to integrate the best elements of face-to-face and online learning: in-class time can be used to involve pupils in interesting interactive experiences, and online activities provide students learning at any time of day and anywhere they have Internet access, including coffee-shops, computer labs, or students’ homes.

However, the development of optimal combined learning environments depends on our understanding of how e-learning and blended learning are best adapted into the curriculum, and how they particularly used by students. Obviously, the analysis of best practices in the classroom and effective usages becomes a relevant contribution to the goal of optimizing education in general.

Within the specific context of a virtual private university, this manuscript offers a case study describing a method for evaluating best practices in the classroom and analyses the impact of the implementation of a neuromarketing project in a course for business students. Neuromarketing provides a significant way of learning to look the opportunities that arise when marketing, technology and neuroscience converge. However, the effect of learning and teaching is dependent on integration method, pupils needs, motivations, and leadership style in the classroom.

This paper is presented as follows. The first section refers the introduction, the programming course, and the motivations related to this experiment. The literature on didactic strategies regarding the experiential learning and teaching in neuromarketing is introduced in Section 2. The experimental results used to evaluate the impact of teaching are discussed in Section 3. Finally, the last section proposes significant remarks, conclusions, implications, and directions for future research in the context of virtual and face-to-face universities. In short, this paper will reveal relevant information in terms of understanding interaction between professor and student in the design of efficient teaching environments for better business education.

Keywords:

Neuromarketing, laboratory activity, teaching, e-learning, business education.