Abstract:

The idea of teaching as a dialogue between teachers and students, and collaboration and sharing between students and their peers ([1], [2]), is gaining traction in higher education. This project showcases the use of collaborative learning to integrate two major fields – marketing and psychology – in a co-creative process to enhance student learning.

Five postgraduate psychology students on the Work, Organizational, and Personnel Psychology (WOP-P) Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Programme at the University of Valéncia (Spain) participated in a marketing workshop with a guest speaker, who introduced them to the topic of customer-to-customer (C2C) co-creation. During the workshop students were encouraged to combine concepts from psychology and social psychology with marketing and consumer behaviour theory. The workshop output was a collaborative student poster (hand-drawn on flipchart paper) with a conceptual framework of C2C co-creation in a selected context. The Learning Outcomes (LOs) were as follows:
1. Demonstrate a critical understanding of the importance of C2C co-creation in socially dense consumption contexts by providing a range of examples
2. Identify and apply relevant concepts from psychology and social psychology in the context of shared consumption and C2C co-creation
3. Present a poster with a conceptual framework of C2C co-creation experience in a specific context.

In the first phase, students were given 3 seminal papers on the topic and were asked to read these ahead of the session. During the first part of the workshop, the guest speaker presented key concepts from marketing, giving lots of practical examples. Students then worked together to map out in a graphical format the antecedents, process, and outcomes of C2C co-creation in a selected context. The context chosen spontaneously was an Erasmus weekend trip made by the 5 of them and other foreign students from Valencian Universities. Students were given a hand-out with a framework from social psychology and were asked to discuss and draw on this and on their previous knowledge to examine the importance of factors such as motivation, goals, resources, personality, social skills, but also features of the social and cultural context as antecedents or mediators in C2C co-creation.
The activity matched students’ interest in learning about contemporary marketing research approaches; co-creating a physical artefact forced them to think creatively, and to give space to each other’s ideas.
The group-based poster activity was chosen to engage students in collaborative learning [2]. The hand-out served as aide memoir to help students analyse their responses. Students were encouraged to draw on their previous knowledge and at the same time, collaborate to apply new concepts in the context of a jointly experienced real-life occurrence. This constitutes a deep approach to learning that focuses students’ attention on the meaning of the topic and the interrelationships between its critical features [1].

References:
[1] N. Entwistle, Teaching and Understanding at University, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
[2] N. Falchikov, Learning Together: Peer Tutoring in Higher Education, London: Routledge, 2001.

Keywords:

Co-creation, peer learning, postgraduate students, workshop.