Professors of Gies Business School Bring a Unique Perspective to Digital Marketing Course

The Gies Business MBA (iMBA) program provides an eight-week digital marketing course that focuses on interaction between students and the curriculum from an innovative perspective.

The Gies Business MBA (iMBA) has taken the initiative to provide hands-on online courses that students can apply directly in their careers. Aric Rindfleisch and Steve Raquel, professors of the iMBA, have offered an eight-week digital marketing course that takes student interaction to the next level. 

“There is a perception that education has to be formal and academic, but the professors bring lightness to the course, which keeps the students intrigued,” said Monique Reis, an iMBA student who completed the course in Spring 2023. The course provides students with modern tools and materials to apply in their work.

Rindfleisch and Raquel are determined to strike a balance between application and involvement, inventing novel approaches to encourage participation in their course by focusing on pertinent topics through an original viewpoint. Many educational institutions provide online advertising courses, typically focusing on social media marketing or statistical analytics. Gies Business is no different. These courses educate significant and useful skills for the careers of MBA candidates. Marketing in Our New Digital World concentrates on something equally useful but with an added bonus. 

Instead of imparting specialized data or marketing skills, students can consider how the digital and traditional worlds interact, using real-world examples such as artificial intelligence and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

According to Racquel, the clinical assistant professor of Business Administration, the course concentrates on the future, not only what students need to acquire to earn their MBA. There are MBA programs that focus solely on digital marketing and intelligence. If students look at the curriculum and how they present this course, they will see that it takes a different perspective on the world, both in terms of the pros and cons of digital and traditional. 

In 2015, Rindfleisch established MOOC Marketing in a Digital World. Since then, more than 550,000 students have registered, which makes it the University of Illinois’ biggest online course.

In addition to connecting course participation to a digital idea taught in class, Rindfleisch and Raquel introduced new concepts this spring, such as ChatGPT. Using the chatbot, students worked in teams to produce an advert for the iMBA program. They also participated in a digital treasure hunt, looking for instances of each idea covered in the course. The whole point of this course is to get people to interact with each other and create a sense of community.