DIFFERENT DIDACTICAL APPROACHES ON ONE COURSE

The Project:
The project m-commerce developed a course to qualify employees of SMEs for introduction and operation of m-commerce services in the company. The customers are more ready because of their technologisation than the many companies. Therefore SMEs need employees who have the appropriate knowledge and skills to implement M-commerce in a SME.

The project has the following objectives :
1) Assessment of current status of M-commerce in different regions of Europe
2) Collection of best-practice examples from different regions
3) Training the course in all seven partner countries.

The determination of the current status of M-commerce takes place over the collection and linking of data from different sources: online survey, conducted interviews in all partner countries, publicly available statistics and current literature . A " by-product" is a collection of best-practice examples. This practice examples can describe complete M-commerce solutions or only some aspects.

The Course:
The preparation of the training material is done by different universities. To ensure the quality and the unified structure a specially created template is used for the development of individual topics . A further quality assurance measure is the mandatory peer review process for all modules.

The course consists of three modules (each two days) and one practice work. Module one contains all the basics needed to create a strategy for the entire business process from marketing to delivery economically optimized and legally correct . The second module deals with the topics of online marketing and consists of items like search engine optimization and social media marketing. An important aspect is the evaluation of this marketing mix. In the third module, the technical contents are included. These enhance the appearance and the usability of the existing e -commerce activities for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs. The practicle part tranfers the content of the course to the need of the existing e-commerce solutions from the participating SMEs. Each training day is supplemented by appropriate practical tasks relevant to the own projects of the participants. The time each participant invests, will be an indicator for the quality of the result .

Didactical Approaches:
The course was done in seven european countries with 3 different didactical approaches: Face to face, Blended Learning, Online Learning. Face to face was a six days-course with at least 15 participants. The blended learning approach was done with two to three classroom sessions and at least three online sessions. The pure online approach was done with tutors which checked the activities of the participants. As learning material all the students got a handout and slides. In the online approach a video was produced for each module, too. Case studies and optional quiz completed the training material.

Results:
As we did note do a test at the end of the trainings, we only got a quality feedback and not a quantitive feedback. The results of each of the didactical approach were nearly the same. Also the number of participants did not differ between the approaches. So we can say, that there is no significant difference on the result. But with different approaches you can activate and motivate different types of participants to take part.

An other interesting result is that the feedback collected at the end of the course differs significant from the feedback collected after some months.