www.mymarketinglab.com
MyMarketingLab
School Name Southwestern Illinois College, Belleville, IL
Course Name Introduction to Marketing
Course Format Online
Submitted by
Sue Taylor, Professor and Program Coordinator
Course materials
MyMarketingLab and Principles of Marketing, Kotler, Armstrong
Setting
Southwestern Illinois College is a two-year com munity college
in Illinois w ith campu ses in Belleville, Gr anite Cit y, and Red
Bud, and more than 20 off- campus sit es. The suburban Bel -
leville campus enrolls more than 11,000 of the system’s 24,000
student s, the majority (57 percent) of whom attend part-time
but a signifi cant numbe r, 37 percent, are first-time, full-time.
Fort y-one percent of students are over age 2 5; 46 percent
receive some financial aid; 36 percent rep ort an ethnicity other
than Caucasian. Southwester n Illinois Co llege has an ove rall full-
time retention rate of 6 4 percent , a part-time retention rate of
42 percent, a nd a graduation rate of 27 percent.
Sue Taylor has been teaching full time for 24 years, and has
been at Sout hwester n Illinois since 1991. She has bee n teaching
Introduc tion to Mar keting for 24 years, the last t wo years in t he
current cou rse format d escribed below.
Introduc tion to Mar keting is a one -semes ter, three-cr edit
course, open to all stud ents but t aken primarily by degree-see k-
ing busine ss students. The cour se introduces students to basic
marketing principles with particular emphasis on environmental
factors that affect a business, t arget mar ket select ion, and the
four prima ry elements of the marketing mix: product, price,
distribution, and promotion.
Course learning objectives include:
• Identif y the environmental forces affec ting a marketer’s
business a nd identif ying the target mar kets for a prod uct,
service, or idea.
• Explain the key compone nts of a dist ribution strateg y for a
product , service, or idea.
• Describe a basic promotion mix for a product, service,
or idea.
• Explain the fundamental elements of a pricing strategy for
a product , service, or idea.
Challenges and Goals
Although she had been t eaching Introductio n to Marketi ng
online for seve ral years, Taylor felt that she and her online stu-
dents could use more cour se assist ance. The hours Taylor spent
identifying and editing content-appropriate videos and writing
accompanying essay quest ions—and gradin g them by hand —
took time away from her other course preparations. Knowing
that publisher content already ex isted that she could tap into,
Taylor took a look at MyMarketingLab. The videos, simulations,
and mini- case studies all held great appeal, and she visualized
how she might incorporat e them into her online course. The
interac tive lect ures— PowerPoint slides with a voice -over
covering the same mater ial presented in the te xtbook— were
especially appealing. While students might not read the w hole
textbook, she felt t hey may be more likely to view the slides as
an outline of important content t o learn before doing the home-
work assignments. Taylor adopted MyMarketingLab in 2013.
Implementation
MyMarketingLab is a required component of Taylor’s course.
Because the class is a fully online , the progr am is prima rily used
at home on the s tudent’s per sonal computer for lear ning new
concepts and content unde rstanding, practice, homework,
and summat ive quizze s. Taylor estimates that the assignment s
should take students about one hour per week, with additional
time spent reading the book, viewing the interactive l ectures,
and study ing for the quizzes. In f act, in a voluntary end of
semeste r survey of Taylor’s stude nts in spring 2015 (50 per-
cent total response rat e), 59 percent of responding students
said they spe nt at least t wo to four hour s per week wor king in
Key Results Data for this cour se indicate a strong positive correlation between MyMarketingLab assignment
grades and aver age chapter quiz grades. In addition, students who completed most of the
MyMarketingLab assignments had average summative chapter quiz grades 15 percentage points
higher than students who skipped at least three assignments.
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