Current Approach
I must admit I came to lecturing in higher education late in life and with no experience. So my approach is very much based on my time, creating, running and attending 500 conferences worldwide over two decades as a conference producer. It was my job to source speakers and create interesting programmes. In that time I learned that the speakers who were the highest rated, and ultimately the best at imparting knowledge were those that:
- Told a story and made it relevant
- Were enthusiastic about their topic
- Built a rapport, and
- Engaged their audience
So this was my starting point when I was first asked to give a lecture and in some respects this is still the case. I never realised how much I knew until I started sharing stories from industry with my students.
Special Events Environment
The module I teach is Special Events Environment which is designed to offer learners a focused overview of the events industry on a global scale. This module provides learners with an understanding and appreciation of how changing political, social, economic and environmental climates affects the events industry.Module Aims:
- To provide learners with a detailed knowledge of the events landscape including concepts and theories implemented by industry experts.
- To enable learners to distinguish various global forces that impact on event management strategies and trends.
- To equip learners to dissect micro and macro factors and examine how they affect a firm’s event and future opportunities.
- To provide learners with the required skills to connect underpinning theory to event concepts and scenarios.
- To equip learners with the necessary skills to compare and analyse event theories, event case studies and relevant academic perspectives.
Learning Outcomes:
- On successful completion of this module, learners will be able to:
- Appraise historic, contemporary, and innovative event management theories and concepts used by marketing and event professionals.
- Analyse the environmental forces that have causal effects on a firm’s event strategy.
- Analyse the economic and social impacts of events on the various key stakeholders.
- Apply underpinning theory to the creation, development and execution of an event.
- Critique key event management literature and associated perspectives.
What I have learned from my postgrad:
It has been particularly interesting to watch how my peers teach. We are a diverse class coming from various backgrounds, colleges and programmes. It was enlightening to see the difference in style, approach and delivery of content. The lecturers teaching English to non-nationals show such creativity and depth of understanding of their students. Respect!
Pedagogical Practice Assignment
I undertook the technology toolkit as my assignment for this module. Marketing practice in the 21st century has been almost entirely permeated by technology, particularly internet based technologies (Harrigan and Hulbert 2011).The global events industry, on which I lecture, has embraced technology at its core. With mobile event applications, online bookings sites, sponsorship and mobile activation applications it is a growing requirement that students entering the industry have an expertise in social media.
I was excited to incorporate my learning from the technology toolkit into my classroom and if I want to be truly honest slightly nervous. Most student communicate through Facebook and various messaging sites and the speed of development within the technology sector is phenomenal. Students live online and if we want to engage with them we need to be there as educators. It is early days for me with Wikis and Twitter but I see the tremendous opportunities for learning and collaboration they afford. There are significant opportunities to incorporate these technologies into projects going forward. I just hope I can keep up!
For the technology enabled learning element in my pedagogical practice I desperately wanted to use a video/youtube clip as I use them so much in my class to show students events in action. However, youtube in itself is a channel not a learning tool. While I was researching I came across Ted Ed.
TED-Ed is a free educational website for teachers and learners. It is a global and interdisciplinary initiative with a commitment to creating lessons worth sharing.
Within the growing TED-Ed video library, teachers can find carefully curated educational videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed platform. This platform also allows users to take any useful educational video, not just TED's, and easily create a customized lesson around the video. Users can distribute the lessons, publicly or privately, and track their impact on the world, a class, or an individual student. Below one of my lessons:
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