Peer Review

BUS203: Course Syllabus - Principles of Marketing

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: May 28, 2020 by Business

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

In this free course, you will learn about the marketing process and examine the range of marketing decisions that an organization must make in order to sell its products and services. You will also learn how to think like a marketer, discovering that the focus of marketing has always been on the consumer. You will begin to ask who the consumer of goods and services is, what the consumer needs, and what the consumer wants. Marketing is an understanding of how to communicate with the consumer, and is characterized by four activities: Creating products and services that serve consumers Communicating a clear value proposition Delivering products and services in a way that optimizes value Exchanging, or trading, value for those offerings

Type of Material:

Online Course, but there is a $25 proctoring fee.

Recommended Uses:

The title of this module is a bit misleading in MERLOT because it says syllabus in the title, but this is just the landing page that takes you to an entire course on marketing principles.

Technical Requirements:

Download FLASH; MS Office Suite, including *.PDF

Identify Major Learning Goals:

Syllabus for a course and online course. The Course Learning Objectives are:

describe the fundamental marketing concepts and terminology;

explain the difference between marketing, advertising, and sales;

describe the process of market research;

describe the concept of pricing;

explain product strategy, including the concepts of product life cycle, positioning, and pricing;

define competition and explain competitive analysis;

analyze the process of distribution and explain marketing channels;

identify the key elements of product promotions;

explain how to develop a marketing plan and apply the principles of marketing in creating a marketing plan;

and explain social media's place in the integrated marketing communications process.

Target Student Population:

College General Ed, College Lower Division, Professional

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

No discipline skills; computer skills; self-paced online course

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

All course materials are FREE, and can be found through the links provided in each unit and subunit of the course. While not as robust as a traditional principles of marketing textbook, it provides enough foundational material to serve as the basis for a good class discussion. Additionally, the book is linked to other outside sources, such as YouTube videos, to supplement the existing text.

Clear syllabus for a self-paced Principles of Marketing course that could be adapted easily to another course.

Gives clear information on technical requirements and how to receive credit.

Course has quality content, including a textbook and many examples, videos, and outside resources.

Concerns:

I am uncertain how frequently the information in the text is updated. Discussions and Assessments might need updating to be useful in a non-self-paced course

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

Each unit ends with a discussion question where students (who are enrolled) can post answers in a bulletin board type of page. Also, there is a unit assessment at the end of each chapter that does not count as a grade, it is just for practice to help students study for the final.

Learning Objectives are identified at the start of every Unit. Integrated text, videos, activities, and resources that can easily be integrated within a course.

Concepts are reinforced and built upon from one unit/chapter to the next.

Concerns:

Specific pre-requisite knowledge isn’t identified, but concepts are defined

Could take specific work to incorporate into a synchronous/paced course

Some chapters are long, so could take a student a lot of time

You must be enrolled to take the assessment.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

The course also contains a free final exam and course completion certificate.

The topics are well organized into six distinct units.

Each chapter contains a variety of materials to help students learn the content. Some of the content appears to be authored by Saylor Academy while others are links to articles, book chapters from other texts such as John Burnett's Core Concepts of Marketing", and videos.

There are many video clips contained within the modules authored by Saylor academy.

It is very easy to use – each unit is divided into sub-segments with readings and resources with the left menu being easy to navigate. The clean use of resources and multimedia that correlate to the units/chapters support learning. It appears to have a fairly strong accessibility (has a few issues identified in Wave extension for Firefox)

Concerns:

All required course resources linked throughout the course, including textbooks, videos, webpages, activities, etc are accessible for no charge, however to view it you must have a Saylor Academy account. I signed up for an account to take a closer look at the content. Users need a full user account to access some of the materials, such as quizzes.

A few of the hyperlinks don't work correctly. For example, I clicked a link and it took me to an entirely different course on economics.

To complete all modules within the course it would take at least 80 hours, according to the estimates provided by Saylor Academy.

Could be more interactive if students could move more easily from one resource to another and from one unit to another

Review accessibility to ensure all learners can access/be accommodated

Other Issues and Comments:: Within MERLOT, I recommend a name change in the module to something such as "Principles of Marketing" online course.
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