Abstract
Smart devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) have become an important part of our daily life. Students spend plenty of time on their smart devices and use them anywhere and at any time. One major activity students engaged in on their smart devices is online social media such as Facebook, Whatsapp, and Wechat. As educators, we should embrace this trend and provide learning opportunities on both platforms – smart devices and online social media.
In this project, I propose to build a “Learning-On-the-Go (LOG)” platform where students can learn business theories and practices within 5-10 minutes on their tablets and smartphones, even when they are on the go. This platform will be set up on one of the major smartphone-based online social media – Wechat. On this platform, I will develop mini modules to introduce business concepts and theories with short articles and interesting mini business cases. Students will not only learn by reading these short articles, even when they are on the go, but also interact with other people through online social media.
Objectives (3Es)
- Expand teaching from offline to online;
- Enhance interactions with students during and beyond working hours;
- Enrich learning experiences inside and outside the classroom.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
- Expand teaching from offline to online;
- Enhance interactions with students during and beyond working hours; and
- Enrich learning experiences inside and outside the classroom.
Activities, process and outcomes
- Set up “Learning-On-the-Go” on smartphone-based online social media Wechat.
- Designed 8 mini modules (more than originally proposed) including “Introduction to Marketing”, “Segmentation”, “Targeting”, “Positioning”, “Product”, “Price”, “Promotion”, and “Place”.
- Scripted education articles and posted them on “Learning-On-the-Go”. Those articles all together have 8,613 words.
- Enhanced curriculum designs: as the prinicipal supervisor collected cases and scripted articles for this “Learning-On-the-Go”, the teaching materials in her class was also updated. The feedbacks from classroom were also put into the articles being drafted.
- Changes in approaches to teaching: as the new cases for the “Learning-On-the-Go” were developed, students were encouraged to do the case study together, step by step and using their smart devices in classroom. Compared with the old fashion teaching methods, students learned how to solve problems on their own.
- So far there are 527 people following the “Learning-On-the-Go”. It means that those people are reading the articles regularly. More people are expected to follow the “Learning-On-the-Go” as more articles will be posted in the next few months.
- So far the articles posted on “Learning-On-the-Go” have been read over 1500 times.
Deliverables and evaluation
So far the following six articles (one in English and five in Chinese) on “Learning-On-the-Go” have been posted:
| Article title |
Number of people who read it so far |
Number of words |
| 以不變應萬變：Netflix的土雞變鳳凰 |
405 |
1480 |
| 2. 2個小時的零和博弈：Netflix如何取勝 |
260 |
1819 |
| Netflix: from DVD Rental to Streaming Video |
186 |
621 |
| 從Weight Watchers到WW: “自我塑身” |
228 |
1316 |
| 毒品買賣中的市場營銷（上篇） |
294 |
1545 |
| 用火燒不死的夜王，用錢燒出市場的HBO |
209 |
1832 |
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
Other fields or areas can use similar methods and provide knowledge that are easy to understand on online social media, especially the smartphone-based online social media. This knowledge is not a substitute to the systematic learning in classroom. But it is a complement so that people can learn the latest knowledge in their fragmented spare time.
