Let me Edutain you!

Posted on: April 30, 2020

How teaching Digital Marketing can be Entertainment and educational at the same time.

Blog post by Dr Aleksej Heinze and Dr Natalia Wiechowski

Header Image CC: https://pixabay.com/photos/concert-crowd-audience-people-768722/

Edutainment is a buzzword which is turning to be a reality for many schools, colleges and higher education institutions. We live in a world where all teachers are increasingly evaluated by the learners. Edutainment is a way to stand out and differentiate yourself in the increasingly competitive world where learners are demanding Education and Entertainment at the same time.

Dr Fox effect

Yes, we know the fact that assessment by learners is never a good indicator of the teaching process. One of the key studies - the so called Dr Fox effect (Ware & Williams, 1975) has proven that there is a significant correlation between learners’ satisfaction with teaching and the amount of entertainment the teacher used. In fact, the study suggests that it is possible to not teach anything but simply entertain and this will result in high learner satisfaction!

Now with increasing numbers of learners expecting Edutainment, how can teachers and instructors adjust and respond to this trend?

The topic of Edutainment was highlighted during our first Digital and Social Media Marketing book launch webinar, which you can find on YouTube here:

The engaging and positive attitude of Dr Natalia Wiechowski during this webinar, that looked at Content as part of digital marketing strategy creation, received a lot of positive comments from our webinar attendees. So, what is it that made Natalia’s contribution special to the learners?

In this blog post by her, it becomes clear that there are a number of factors which nowadays (personal) brands have to follow when developing digital marketing content. For educators here are some ideas and qualities which we could develop:

Public Speaking

• Owning the stage by being confident
• Using a variety in your intonation so not to be monotonous
• Using body language to project the message
• Engaging and connecting with the audience, this could be via apps such as interactive tests see Kahoot.it or Quizzes
• Sharing (personal) stories about the subject matter of course! The book for example uses a number of examples / stories that illustrate the subject matter.
• Inspiring, motivating the audience to excel and become the best digital marketing practitioners

Communication & relationships

• Listening to others and taking feedback to improve - this can be anonymous feedback polls for every session done using a range of free and already available tools
• Understanding the world of our audience: their interests, fears, activities which could be done as a first set of the session icebreaker
• Encouraging, praising and complimenting the audience even on small successes
• Genuinely caring about the audience, wanting them to succeed with information that we share
• Being transparent about the knowledge that is shared and any links to examples or limitations of our knowledge in certain areas so far

Kindness & compassion

• Being warm and friendly when sharing your stories help for your message to arrive better
• Being passionate for learning, enthusiastic about the subject comes through your body language and speech, do make the most of it when educating
• Being approachable, human and vulnerable can have many positive outcomes (e.g. in encouraging the audience to take action)
• Taking yourself not too serious - life is too short as it is try and introduce some fun activities in between
• Smile and the world smiles with you! Whilst humour is difficult to translate especially for non native speaker audiences smile in an international form of sharing joy of learning and teaching
• Whilst this is not the most exhaustive list of ideas to become an Edutainer when teaching digital marketing, it is essential to recognise that as a marketer it is about enabling others to connect with people.

Do as I say and don’t do as I do

Being an educator is not something that happens overnight. When Aleksej started teaching at KEDGE Business School - a private French business school, it was a bit of a shock to the system. Unlike in the UK, where he was used in the past, the views of the students are counted towards his annual evaluation. Aleksej reacted by keeping the same learning workload and using interactive quizzes at the start of each session as a revision of previous ideas and using live teaching case studies and choosing a winning team - whilst the prizes were symbolic it introduced gamification amongst teams. Here is an example of a team that developed the best digital marketing strategy for Tori Griffiths a pilates instructor:

Of course, individual knowledge tested through Kahoots also makes it fun and engaging for all learners too

 
So, whilst Dr Fox effect still is alive and well, we do have a number of tools and methods to make learning more fun! Gamification and making interactive competitions to be part of the learning and teaching process makes things far more interesting for both teachers and learners of digital marketing.

The online short videos that explain some of the main concepts of the Digital and Social Media Marketing book are also using examples and stories from practitioners. See the online learning course here and order an inspection copy of the book here.

References

Johnson, B. & McElroy T. M. (2010). The Edutainer: connecting the art and science of teaching. Rowman & Littlefield Education

Ware, J. E., & Williams, R. G. (1975). The Dr. Fox effect: a study of lecturer effectiveness and ratings of instruction. Journal of medical education.