Abstract
- The rapid growth of digital marketing and digital data evolving from digital disruption in today’s industries has called for work-ready undergraduates in the digital marketing analytics area. Along with this trend, there is an increasing need for pedagogical approaches to address the theory-practice gap in digital marketing analytics education. Yet, the pedagogical approaches to digital marketing analytics education are mostly anecdotal or focused on students’ perceived learning. To bridge the theory-practice gap, this study proposes two commonly adopted pedagogical approaches – simulation and client-based projects—to design digital marketing analytics courses from three practice-informed dimensions (i.e., knowledge, hard skills, and soft skills) and compares students’ actual learning effectiveness between these two approaches. Results show that the simulation-based approach outperforms the client-based project approach in overall grade but the significance is mostly from the knowledge dimension. Both approaches are found to be comparable in bridging the theory-practice gap from building practical skills in students; however, they are targeted at the development of different sets of hard skills and soft skills. The study then provides implications to marketing educators in digital marketing analytics course design and a faculty reflection on the two pedagogical approaches.