In this session, attendees gain a clear sense of how General Assembly uses industry content standards, along with user and market research, to produce blended digital marketing courses across various modalities. Attendees will participate in a hands-on activity to understand how to effectively integrate online content into an in-person course.
The primary focus of this presentation is to showcase how General Assembly (GA) leverages online content to create a blended experience that deepens student learning across its many digital marketing education programs.
What does this session cover?
In this session, attendees gain a clear sense of how GA uses industry content standards, along with user and market research, to produce blended digital marketing courses.
Through a case study, attendees will gain a firsthand perspective of what blended learning means at GA and how GA uses blended learning to differentiate and deepen learning for a wide range of students. Additionally, attendees will participate in a hands-on activity to understand how to effectively integrate online content into an in-person course.
What is the central problem GA is looking to solve?
Problem: At GA, we develop online and in-person courses for a range of consumer profiles and Enterprise partners. This broad audience creates a unique challenge for delivering instruction across various modalities while still maintaining high standards for course content, teaching methods, and student learning.
Solution: At GA, we use internally designed industry content standards to create modular content that we can leverage in blended courses.
Why digital marketing?
Digital marketing is one of our most in-demand courses across a variety of markets and modalities. As marketing increasingly becomes a data-driven discipline and firms adopt quantitative approaches to targeting customers and measuring campaigns, statistical and technical skills are becoming increasingly valuable on the job market. These digital marketing and marketing automation roles require a combination of the sort of analytical or data skills more commonly found in statistical or IT roles, paired with traditional marketing skills such as communication and creativity.
On the job market, the number of open technical marketing positions has more than doubled (a 145% increase since 2011), according to a report released by GA in August 2015. The average salary is $77,000, indicating a 25% premium over marketers without technical skills. In fact, the call for candidates with the top five skills in digital marketing and automation has grown at an astounding average of 500%. Traditional marketing roles, on the other hand, grew only by 16% over the same time period.
As a result, individuals identify digital marketing skills as having greater return on investment. Some with traditional marketing experience are looking to skill up and stay competitive in the field’s changing landscape. Others are interested in changing careers and transitioning to a more in-demand industry. Furthermore, business leaders recognize that, to implement cutting-edge marketing strategy, their employees, managers, and C-suite executives require reliable learning and development to keep pace with evolving marketing channels and tactics.
What do digital marketing courses look like at GA?
We offer six digital marketing educational programs. For our consumer audiences, we offer a blended-learning Digital Marketing course in both a 10-week, part-time or a 1-week, accelerated format. This course covers the current tools and best practices digital marketers use to promote a brand, drive sales leads, and increase customer engagement. By the end of the course, students are able to use a full arsenal of digital marketing tools to design and execute a comprehensive marketing plan for any product through any digital channel. They can then analyze and optimize these campaigns using tools such as Google Analytics.
Our Digital Marketing Circuit (DMC) is our online, asynchronous course. Students learn the ropes of digital marketing with help from a mentor, and master customer acquisition, conversion, and optimization. Upon completion of the course, students become fluent in the tactics used by digital marketers to acquire, convert, and retain customers.
Digital Foundations (DF) and Essentials of Digital Marketing (EDM) are our Enterprise programs, offered online through our own custom learning platform. DF helps employees build digital fluency in areas such as the customer journey, digital leadership, digital marketing, user experience design, and data and analytics. It enables employees to up-skill in the digital landscape. EDM is built for current digital marketers at Fortune 500-1000 companies and provides a modular, timely approach to understanding how to successfully connect with customers on today's digital channels. The course is made up of 60+ online lessons that introduce, define, and contextualize fundamental digital marketing topics. These include foundations, data and analytics, digital advertising, mobile and tablet, social and content, and multichannel marketing.
Finally, we have our assessment tool, Credentials. Credentials is a platform that allows employers to objectively measure the expertise of digital marketing candidates or employees. For individuals, it acts as a means to showcase their digital marketing expertise to potential employers.
How has GA approached developing blended courses?
All six of our education programs cater to different audiences and needs. To effectively reach this wide range of students, GA prioritizes three goals. Let’s walk through each:
1. Ensuring high-quality content across all modes of delivery.
The instructional design team at General Assembly has developed a robust set of high-level standards with which all digital marketing course offerings align. Each standard is broken down into granular learning objectives, which are explored in varying depths depending on the course and its students.
These standards, which are designed to align with the industry expectations of an entry-level, mid-level, and senior-level digital marketer, allow GA to be transparent about the depth and breadth of various course offerings.
Part of this presentation would involve showcasing various “views” of GA’s digital marketing standards, as well as demonstrating how our instructional design team uses those standards to design, refresh, market, and sell courses.
2. Diversifying and personalizing offerings by thinking of our content as modular.
At GA, we use leading digital marketing professionals as subject matter experts to build content for our asynchronous online courses, accelerated and part-time on-campus courses.
Our goal is not to reinvent the wheel each time we develop content for a new course. Rather, we aim to build robust content library we can then tailor for specific offerings. In this vein, we think of our content as modular.
To ensure its quality, we align course content with our Credentials assessment and the standards identified in the previous bullet. A good portion of this content is offered online so as to drive our blended-learning efforts.3. Ensuring high-quality instruction across all modes of delivery.
With such diverse course offerings and high standards for our content, it is critical that we also offer high-quality teaching and learning experiences. To achieve this, GA uses a blended, hands-on learning approach for both online and in-person content.
In our on-campus courses, blended learning helps students achieve a greater depth of knowledge in a shorter amount of time. The diagrams below compare traditional, lecture-based courses with a blended-learning model. As the diagrams show, blended learning frees up critical classroom time to allow for more hands-on, impactful classroom sessions.
Our online courses are project-based and center around use cases and hands-on exercises in which students can apply their knowledge. The projects at the end of each unit of a course are cumulative, allowing students to gain practical experience with each phase of a digital marketing initiative. To ensure that our students are engaged and receive any additional support they need, our online courses feature a live component with individual mentor sessions.
How can I apply what GA has done with digital marketing to my educational program?
In an effort to make this presentation a hands-on learning experience, it will include a demo.
Demo: Crafting Blended-Learning Opportunities
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We will begin by playing a short video featured in the online pre-work for one of our digital marketing courses.
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We will then ask audience members to work in small groups or with partners to define an in-class lesson or activity as a follow up to the pre-work.
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We will ask groups to share their answers.
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We will then explore a few of the ways General Assembly has approached these lesson plans.
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Wrap Up and Discussion: Discuss how attendees can apply learnings from the day into their own professional environment.