English for Marketing - Course Outline

English for Marketing Class Blog

Dear students,

Thanks for the enthusiastic session we had last week. This is the course outline for your reference.

Purpose
The purpose of this course is to equip the students with the necessary English skills to write and communicate and give presentation on general topics of marketing in English.
The class program cosists of class activities, blog project and final report. Below is the description.

I. English for Marketing Class ActivitiesThe class activities would consist of writing exercises and presentation. Writing exercises are done in collaboration with peers and/or teacher on specific topics. The presentation is done based on the writing to the class. For the presentation, Powerpoint presentation is a must. Presentation should be conducted totally in English.

The topics are:

1. Companies (types, products, activities, responsibilities, etc.)
2. Products and prices
3. Consumer segmentation
4. Consumer behavior
5. Promotion/marketing strategies
6. Selling strategies

For each topic, the students shall do at least internet research about a particular company and collect data about the aspects of the company related to the topic. For example, for topic 2, a student may research Unilever (company), and write report about its products and prices. To give a deeper dive, students can write about particular products out of all the products. (The students data and opinion about a particular aspect is to be written in the blog project.) After the report is agreed by the teacher, the students develop a powerpoin presentation to be presented in the class.
The total score for this part is 30 points.
II. English for Marketing Class Blog(Thanks to Jeffrey Hill, of Normandy Business School in Le Havre, France for this activity idea. I copy your idea here :-) for my classes. - http://escmarketing.blogspot.com/. See also http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/normandy_business_school/ )Each student is required to create a blog for this course. The blog should provide an insight into the chosen topic and act as a forum for discussion.We shall be using Blogger for this project as it is free, user-friendly and hosted.All students must post at least one new entry to their blog each week. Posts must relate to the chosen topic and should contain what experts say and their original commentary. Quotes from other sources must be clearly identified and, wherever possible, linked to. Students must also post at least one comment per week on their classmates' blogs. These are minimum requirements and further posts/comments are to be encouraged. Students will also be responsible for responding to any comments posted by classmates (or the teacher) on their own blog.A links list should be created on the blog with links to sites relevant to the chosen topic. Links may point to web sites, other blogs or articles.Each class member is required to subscribe to all of the other class members' blogs using Bloglines, a news aggregator. This means that each blog will need an RSS feed, something which Blogger creates automatically.
These are what you should have to do by the end of next week.

1. Signed up for a Blogger account.
2. Chosen a topic and created your blog.
3. Made a post introducing yourself and first posting of your topic.
4. Send the URL to me.
5. Put a site feed link in your sidebar
6. You should be able to:

• Post a photo on your blog
• Place a link within a post.
• Add links to your sidebar.
• Subscribe to your classmate's blog.

From now until the end of the course you should make a minimum of one post per week. You should also leave a comment on at least one other blog. There will be a prize for the best blog. The winning blogs will be selected by the class members and teachers.
Tips:

• Remember that the best blogs are personal. People want to hear what you think.
• Try to vary the types of posts you make.* Keep your posts relatively short: 10 lines maximum.
• Use the spell checker.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment.
  

The credit for this blog project is 50 points.
How to syndicate your blog (taken from Mr, Hill's blog).
Syndicating your blog means making the content available via an RSS feed. An RSS feed is a kind of link you put on your blog so that users can read your blog in a feed reader such as Bloglines. You can find the site feed for this blog at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. If you wanted to read the 40 or blogs created for this project, you'd normally have to visit each one in turn. This would take a long time. However, if you subscribe to the feeds of these blogs using a feed reader, you can view the content of all those blogs in a single window. It is therefore a much quicker way of tracking and viewing multiple blogs.
To put an RSS feed on your blog, first go to Settings and copy the URL you'll find under Site Feed. Then put the feed link in your blog sidebar by creating a link in your blog template.
To subscribe to a feed using Bloglines, you first need to set up an account. Once you have done that, go to the blog you want to subscribe to and copy the URL of the blog feed (right click on link and copy shortcut). Return to Bloglines and click on My Feeds > Add. Enter the blog feed URL and voilà, you've subscribed. Repeat for as many blogs as you wish to subscribe to. You can organise your feeds into folders (Choose action > Move to: New folder), in which case all the blogs in a given folder will be displayed in a single window. I've tried to keep this explanation as simple as possible.
III. English for Marketing Class ArticleFinal report is an article made individually by the students at the end of the course. This article can be a rewriting of the blog entries or entirely new article made from the scratch.
The credit for this article is 20 points.