After attending the blended learning workshop by Ron Owston in January 2008, I was pretty excited about it and felt that I definitely need to apply something to my upcoming course (for the 072 semester). I wanted to do Flickr webpage, a YouTube webpage and a wiki for my MKT330 course on Advertising & Sales Promotion. However, because I was teaching the course for the first time, I have come to realize that practically speaking I would not be able to handle all three…so I decided to stick with a Flickr webpage and do the most of it. I also had online office hours using Yahoo Messenger.
Well…I began forming my Flickr webpage and created an MKT330 group for my course, which can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/alshebil-mkt330/.
The objective of the Flickr group was to post and share local ads and ask for student comments on them whilst providing some application of the course and ultimately creating perhaps a local KSA/GCC ads database.

It’s February 16, 2008…the semester began…and feeling excited I also included the Flickr webpage on my syllabus. I made one post on a local outdoor ad that I saw and sought my students’ comments on it. During my first class I introduced our course syllabus including the Flickr webpage and asked students to participate.
Inspite of all this and a few oral reminders in class, I only ended up having 15 members from my 69 students…and only 2 posts..one by me and another by one very excited student..
As time passed I realized that my Flickr webpage was not getting student attention as I expected. There was almost no activity at all. Part of the problem was that I was teaching this as a new course where I had to also cover a chapter a class, so I was barely catching up with the material itself, not to mention exams etc.
Assignment 4 was based on chapter 16: Sales Promotion. It said “Bring me examples of at least three different consumer-oriented types of sales promotion. For instance an example of a sample, a premium, and a bonus pack. Refer to your textbook for the different types. The examples need to be local (e.g. from a local supermarket or local retail store) and I need to see a picture of each. I only need a soft copy of the three examples (or more if you can). The soft copy with all the three (or more) pictures should be uploaded onto WebCT in one document AND on our Flickr webpage. I don’t need a lot of description or anything, all I need is the example and what type is it.”
May 6th I decided to do something about it…with Assignment 4 (our last assignment). I began the day with the the Flickr webpage with a “Failed” stamp on it. As I expressed my disappointment, I also realized that some students were not even aware of till now?! How come I said?It was on the syllabus?!. Well some didn’t come till the second week when things have already begun so they missed the introductory class…and some even said that they don’t read everything in the syllabus?!
I began several classes from then with a short presentation update of the Flickr webpage. I also gave a demonstration of how to upload pictures (since it seemed to be a bit of a hassle I realized). Today, I’m happy to say that the number of students who joined the group grew up to 67 members now! And with 52 ad/sales promotion posts! (some related to the homework some not).The deadline for assignment 4 is June 3rd and I’ll wait and see what happens till then….but since we are at almost full membership now and the number of posts seems to be growing ….I can safely say that and my MKT330 Flickr webpage is back and alive!

Here are some lessons that I learnt from all this:
- Students generally need an incentive to do something. One of the main reasons for why the initial failure of the Flickr webpage was the lack of a real incentive for students to take part in it. Assignment # 4 really helped.
- Announcing the Flickr webpage during the first week didn’t seem to be the best time, or at least I should have made sure that everyone was aware of it later not just by talking about it but by showing it on screen.
- Getting the students to be members of the group is one thing….but getting them to post is another. Membership is necessary but not sufficient. Getting them to be active participants is what we are really after! A Non-active participant means nothing to the group.
- The Flickr class demonstration was pretty important especially for those less tech savy students who need a “techno push” to get things done.
- Constant reminders of the Flickr page update also greatly helped.
- Regarding member names, make sure students sign in using real names and preferably with pictures as well. I realized that some use generic names (e.g. luv school, …guy..etc.) which wouldn’t be very helpful for me to tell who is who as one can probably guess. Besides that, correcting the assignment will be a nightmare then!
- With a large number of students (69 in my case) managing such a site can become pretty cumbersome requiring great effort and time. I would further say that it may also be unpractical and unfeasible sometimes to cope up with. Alternative methods for monitoring such large classes may be sought, e.g. a grader perhaps can help in monitoring assignments etc.
- I decided to ad my picture in my profile and asked students to do the same. Though this seems to be a small matter, I think that students would interact and be more interested when there is a face that comes with a comment especially from their instructor…


Now that those who attended the course have completed the course, they should have many things to discuss and share with all of us. Fusion is the place for this purpose. We are about 45 faculty members from KFUPM and 20 from Tabuk University who have been participating in the recent activities of this semester. Most of us have already made attempts to explore and use in our teaching what has been discussed in these activities. We can make use of Fusion to keep our community intact and become stronger in its relationships by stay participating in the community through Fusion with our thoughts and experiences.
Clipart Source:
In addition to instructors and students feedback on the work of a student posted online, a course management system like WebCT provides quiz & self-test tools as means for providing instant feedback. Students can submit a quiz or self-test which is instantly assessed by WebCT and an assessment report can immediately become available to the students providing an instant feedback on their performance on a quiz or self-test.