Abstract:

Since a lot of us experienced softer or not-so-soft lockdown, the intention of the instructors on the International Business program and IT program at our university was to develop a joint tool that could help in the online delivery of our courses. The main objective of this approach is to develop an Internet Marketing simulation in the form of a web application. The simulation provides International Business students with hands-on experience in the field of digital marketing and with an opportunity to develop their digital marketing skills through gamification of the learning process. At the same time, IT students have an opportunity to develop a web application that will be used and reviewed by their International Business colleagues. In this way, IT students can receive immediate and honest feedback about the user experience (much easier than in-class mode delivery of the courses because the feedback in blended), responsiveness, and application feature from the first hand (many of IT students will be oriented on building business application once they graduate, so this experience from their colleagues from the business program could be really valuable since they might be their future business partners and business users, so they will already have insight about their preferences).

Based on the current students’ feedback on both courses, students would like to have more real-world and real-time examples and as much as possible real-world experience, so we translated these needs into a virtual space. With this Internet marketing simulation, the aim is to provide for both groups of students’ pieces of knowledge and experience they need. They will have a better understanding of fundamentals that are demanded through course topics more interestingly and funnily, and they will learn by examples instead of theoretical descriptions and just sharing instructors’ experiences. In this way, our proposed simulation enables active learning, not in just one, but two courses, in two different programs, and the most important, everything could be run on-line.

The proposed solution includes IT students to design and develop a web application for Internet Marketing simulation, and International Business students that will partly design business logic and partly use such application for hands-on exercises and simulation of using of four main digital marketing tools – social networking, content creating and sharing, search engine marketing and display advertising.

Keywords:

Joint course delivery, online education, Internet Marketing simulation.