Whew....

Projects submitted, final presentations delivered, grades entered and “debated”…It’s nice to have a bit of a break from classes and teaching for the summer.  Not exactly a break, since I need to revise lectures, develop a new class, present at conferences, deliver a workshop for executives, finish up research and bring in sponsors and projects for next semester. I teach a few classes both in our master’s and our executive education programs.  Without a doubt, the most challenging is a class I call “Measuring Social”.  I also think it is one of the most beneficial for students. (I am biased of course)  The class focuses on 3 key elements:

• Design thinking
• Experiential learning
• Unstructured data

Let me elaborate on these different elements. We deploy design thinking to essentially solve complex problems.  In order to do this, I bring organizations into the class (7 each semester).  They develop a project briefing for the students to work on.  Rather than exams and homework, the students are graded on how they interact with their client, deploy tools, frameworks or experiences within their collective arsenal and develop something of value for the their clients.  I say something in that it’s never exactly spelled out.  Outputs have ranged from algorithms to social apps (design and requirements, we stop short of coding) to experimental measurement frameworks.  Of course with each project, teams must demonstrate an understanding of key market segments, best practices, community analysis, data collection processes, etc.

Experiential learning simply means that I try to recreate or simulate a typical working environment.  In order to do that, students are not allowed to select team members or projects.  I take quite a bit of time to do some social engineering of the teams so that there is a balance between M/F, Quant. vs. Creative, and Policy vs. Strategy. By placing students in these types of situations, interaction with real clients on real issues, they become better at handling the ambiguity associated with client work and weeding through noise to add value in a relatively short time frame (4 months).  The students need to get up to speed on an industry, organization and how social is impacting their ecosystem.  So the critical parts include project planning, task delegation, and communication plan basically designing a PMO.

The last part is the theme to the class - understanding, collecting and analyzing unstructured content generated through online social interactions both externally and internally in relation to an organization.  Through close to 50 projects, we have seen quite a bit ranging from the hypothetical academic research related to the very tactical.  Several want to understand how to better engage different stakeholder communities while others want to mine vast repositories of stored data for insight on innovation, collaboration or simply how work more efficiently.  Some of the trends I have noticed from running the class over the past three years

• Most companies get social.  It’s no longer an amorphous concept that is delegated to interns.  Budgets for social are not the same as traditional marketing expenditures but they are encroaching on them quickly
• Metrics vary from industry to industry, company to company, department to department and yes campaign to campaign.  Deciding which ones are critical is key to achieving buy-in
• Companies are realizing they they need good internal social awareness and processes prior to designing and implementing external facing social campaigns
• Companies that “get social” are leveraging it for a wide variety of uses.  It’s not simply about brand building
• Companies are interested in students that have done projects with social especially around analysis.  My students who put their “Measuring Social” project experience on their resumes get brought into interviews to discuss their projects

Over the past 7 iterations of the class, we have worked with close to 50 organizations.  Folks who have taken part in the class include

• Thomson Reuters
• PepsiCo
• Adidas
• Ford
• Warner Bros.
• HBO
• Comcast
• eBay
• Microsoft
• Zynga
• Starwood
• Ford
• Time
• Credit Suisse
• Pittsburgh Steelers
• American Eagle

It’s my belief that we will see more of these types of courses in the future.  Like all other industries, higher education is also going through a transformation (or disruption) where the old processes for delivering education are being challenged.  After all, how do you educate the next generation of student when they have real time access to massive quantities of information? The introduction of MOOCs, greater amounts of distance education, and technical training/certification classes have forced colleges and universities to rethink how to deliver value to students.  As a professor, I see a shift in typical lecturing and greater amounts of mentoring, coaching, facilitating, etc.   It’s refreshing to know that other colleagues are interested in this idea of experiential learning as well.  I’m excited to be heading to a gathering of folks from top b-schools who will be discussing some of the challenges and opportunities of infusing experiential learning into their curriculum.

So now that I have a bit of a break, I can update my syllabus and course content, play around with some new measurement tools, arrange some speakers to come into present in the fall and oh yeah – identify, pitch and try to bring in another 14 sponsors to participate in the class for next year…