Abstract:

During the Covid19 pandemic, we have all been forced, teachers and students, to a huge adaptation and flexibility in higher education courses. The literature on these experiences has been developing and is now quite extensive, where teachers report the constraints, but also the opportunities that distance learning regimes have brought us.

These reports are crucial to understanding how the adaptations we were forced to make resulted in much more productive activities for students that we had not thought of before. These experiences are also fundamental for drawing lessons for the future and for other colleagues to be able to use these examples and replicate them in their own subjects.

This article aims to describe an experience developed in an introductory Marketing subject that, by the imposition of the university management, was forced to adopt a blended learning regime during the Covid19 pandemic. What started as a problem turned into an opportunity. Aiming to increase students' motivation, an alumni contact activity was developed that would be very difficult to implement in exclusively classroom-based teaching. This activity turned out to be the central activity of the subject, increasing students' motivation, promoting new experiences, networking, and common work.

Keywords:

Marketing education, blended learning, alumni, students motivation.