ON CAMPUS
Daniel Weingrod, Professor of Digital Marketing, is the brains
behind the creation of Hult’s first blended course. His 15 years
of consultancy experience in the digital and social media
marketing worlds for companies including Aetna, AIG, Pitney
Boews, and Prudential Securities means he is perfectly placed to
translate real-life business knowledge into teachable content.
How have you found being a Lead Professor
for Hult’s first ever blended course?
It was quite a unique challenge. I have taught
online courses before and, of course, have
taught in person, but blending the two presented
a different opportunity. The key was first finding
an overall theme that could support the interest
of students across multiple campuses. Then, the
next challenge was creating content that would
drive overall interest while giving faculty the
opportunity to tailor their work with the students
to match their own strengths and interests.
It was also critically important that the
videos needed to be as professional looking
as possible. Students today are very discerning
of media and they will ignore anything that is
sub par. This meant setting up a home video
studio and getting excellent support with editing
and post-production from Frederik Dubois, our
Product Manager. I also worked hard to script
the content to ensure it was timely, relevant
and hopefully, at the right times, humorous.
The majority of the content was delivered
online through short video lectures, expert
videos, and selected articles. How did students
benefit from this new online teaching method?
By delivering lecture content online we
were able to take advantage of the ‘flipped
classroom’ concept where students are
introduced to content at home and view it at their
own pace, and then work through the ideas on
campus. This allows students to integrate the
future mindset concepts online and deploy them
on their project ideas with the help of faculty.
This method helped to bring the concepts of the
course to life more quickly and effectively.
In your opinion, what elements of the course
could be changed, and what could be added,
to make it even more successful this year?
While the ‘City of the Future’ challenge
generated a great deal of interest and some
very creative executions, I think we need to focus
more finely by either relating the challenge to a
specific problem or area, or targeting specific
local opportunities, perhaps with local input.
6
week program
956
students
participated
300
minutes of
webinar
93
online videos
10
hours coaching time
given each week
per coach
64