I aim to not only teach marketing-related knowledge content, but also remind students the boundaries of theory application, helping them to build up a skill to identify and adopt the right theory at the right time. To attain this goal, my teaching philosophy emphasizes three principles, which I have applied across all three courses I have taught at UIC (i.e., introduction of marketing, marketing research, and consumer behavior).
1. Knowing the Context –I would like to teach marketing knowledge to students by clarifying that each learned theory and concept is a tool to tackle a respective problem, and by highlighting that knowing how and when to adopt each theory (instructions to use each tool) is as important as the accumulation of knowledge …show more content…
Learning by Doing – I truly like one piece of conventional wisdom provided by the well-known educator and philosopher Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”. So I not only frequently demonstrate many real life examples in my lecture to link theories in textbook with business practices in reality, but also design activities that let students experience what I try to teach by their own eyes and ears. For term projects, I request student to apply learned theories and concepts to analyze a happening marketing-related issue (e.g., Will Tesla’s new model disrupt the automobile market?). Students need to go through research meetings (with or without me), data collection, analysis, and presentation processes, as they were marketing analysts. For exams, rather than using multiple questions, I largely use short cases to test if they can master what they have learned to respond to real world cases. For example, I provide commercials videos and movie clips that involve consumer decision process, and then ask them to analyze the effectiveness of that commercial and the involved consumer decision criterion, respectively. For assignments, I design several participant-observation tasks that let them immerse in some new consumption phenomenon (e.g., online streaming and professional gaming) and share how they feel with each other. As a result, students react positively toward those projects and exams. I got some good feedbacks like “… taught me more …show more content…
As an international PhD student had never studied abroad before and being an instructor with full responsibility for course development and delivery, I faced some difficulties when I taught each course at the first time. I was not familiar with how American students interact with instructors and what they expect regarding the course workload, difficulty of assignments and exams, and course pace, especially for teaching marketing research course, which involves lots of statistics and mathematics knowledge. To deal with those difficulties, I have tried to improve my teaching with the following methods.
1. Being flexible – I have tried to be as flexible as possible by continuously communicating with all students, encouraging them to ask questions in class, and establishing a friendly environment for discussion. I also spent much time on office hours to deal with individual demand of students. According to those in-class discussions and emerging issues I found during office hours, I kept updating and adjusting my course pace and requirements. As a result, students seemed to positively react to their learning experience. I receive positive feedbacks like “Always helps whenever we needed him. Great personality! ”, “The professor was very nice and helpful. Always open to hear our thoughts on subject and very enthusiastic to teach”, and “Ko 's care for the subject and compassion toward his students
1. Knowing the Context –I would like to teach marketing knowledge to students by clarifying that each learned theory and concept is a tool to tackle a respective problem, and by highlighting that knowing how and when to adopt each theory (instructions to use each tool) is as important as the accumulation of knowledge …show more content…
Learning by Doing – I truly like one piece of conventional wisdom provided by the well-known educator and philosopher Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”. So I not only frequently demonstrate many real life examples in my lecture to link theories in textbook with business practices in reality, but also design activities that let students experience what I try to teach by their own eyes and ears. For term projects, I request student to apply learned theories and concepts to analyze a happening marketing-related issue (e.g., Will Tesla’s new model disrupt the automobile market?). Students need to go through research meetings (with or without me), data collection, analysis, and presentation processes, as they were marketing analysts. For exams, rather than using multiple questions, I largely use short cases to test if they can master what they have learned to respond to real world cases. For example, I provide commercials videos and movie clips that involve consumer decision process, and then ask them to analyze the effectiveness of that commercial and the involved consumer decision criterion, respectively. For assignments, I design several participant-observation tasks that let them immerse in some new consumption phenomenon (e.g., online streaming and professional gaming) and share how they feel with each other. As a result, students react positively toward those projects and exams. I got some good feedbacks like “… taught me more …show more content…
As an international PhD student had never studied abroad before and being an instructor with full responsibility for course development and delivery, I faced some difficulties when I taught each course at the first time. I was not familiar with how American students interact with instructors and what they expect regarding the course workload, difficulty of assignments and exams, and course pace, especially for teaching marketing research course, which involves lots of statistics and mathematics knowledge. To deal with those difficulties, I have tried to improve my teaching with the following methods.
1. Being flexible – I have tried to be as flexible as possible by continuously communicating with all students, encouraging them to ask questions in class, and establishing a friendly environment for discussion. I also spent much time on office hours to deal with individual demand of students. According to those in-class discussions and emerging issues I found during office hours, I kept updating and adjusting my course pace and requirements. As a result, students seemed to positively react to their learning experience. I receive positive feedbacks like “Always helps whenever we needed him. Great personality! ”, “The professor was very nice and helpful. Always open to hear our thoughts on subject and very enthusiastic to teach”, and “Ko 's care for the subject and compassion toward his students