Addressing the Educational Challenges of Experiential Learning in Teaching of Internet Marketing at Thompson Rivers University

One of many educational challenges in higher education is to combine theory with the practical knowledge that students need to have learned upon graduation. Most business schools in North America address this issue by using case studies. In the business area of internet marketing, learning by analyzing case studies does not create the excitement in students that many teachers would hope for. Unless the learning objectives are directly linked to the students’ personal career objectives, the success of the traditional case study approach is slowly decreasing. To break from a typical case study approach, this Author has introduced a modified live case study to the students in the School of Business at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in Canada. Instead of collaborating with external businesses sponsors, the students became project sponsors themselves. The entire experience required the marketing students to obtain the knowledge needed to fully understand many challenges of internet marketing. It included real activities such as developing content for a website, creating and running online advertising, monitoring website performance, and solving many challenging problems.This paper summarizes this live case study experience, which has been successfully implemented in the last two semesters at TRU. It provides recommendations that other instructors may consider before introducing a similar experience in their classrooms.