Experiential learning provides students with hands-on training to build workforce skills, but some concepts may be difficult to demonstrate in the classroom.
Professors of Marketing and Management at Hult International Business School have developed simulation gameplay to help learners understand how digital advertising and theory is applied in real time.
Novela, a simulation, teaches learners how to understand the core components of paid search marketing campaigns and learn strategies for analyzing real-time data and evaluating campaign performance.
“It all started with a curiosity about how to bring active learning into the classroom without losing the theoretical foundation that provides deeper content,” says McKenzie, a faculty member in the Department of Marketing and Management and creator of Novela Clark Boyd says. “We really wanted to avoid superficial 'games' that looked sophisticated and engaged class participants, but had little impact on learning.”
background: Across higher education, learning gaps can exist between students who are more comfortable with theory and practical application on the job.
In his first role at a digital marketing agency, Boyd feels it took him six months to get used to the job. “It wasn't fun. I thought it was impossible to understand what we were doing. But objectively speaking, we got better at it,” he says. .
As an adjunct professor, he began to see the learning gap from a different perspective, realizing that many career academics had never worked in digital marketing and didn't know how to prepare students for the job.
So he decided to work with his educational technology group to create a digital marketing simulation that would not only teach students theory in class, but also familiarize them with the practice they would need in their first role.
How to use: Students play as marketing managers for Autostaff, a fictional luxury company loosely modeled after Burberry. They are tasked with increasing sales of the company's Trench His Coats through search engine marketing, with a total budget of $12,000.
Students will learn how to select target keywords in their copy and set bids for their ads within search engines before they create and market their ads. This game provides students with real data from Google and third-party tools built to closely mimic Google's functionality.
“If you go into a marketing job after this, you're going to spend your day looking at these dashboards. Your life is going to be these dashboards,” says Boyd.
Within Novela, students can identify their audience, budget, and creative materials before they start advertising.
Within the game, students can leverage artificial intelligence to interact with customer personas, conduct interactive focus groups, and create marketing campaigns based on these insights. Students also receive support from Ela, an AI assistant who provides suggestions and advice.
After receiving their results, students can add them to the classroom leaderboard or play again to get different results.
It takes about 45 minutes for students to complete the game the first time, but Boyd said he plans to allocate an entire class period to help students get started. After the first round, many students play again and again, many playing her 20 or more times, becoming faster and better at navigating the dashboard.
With Novela, students can interact with AI-powered customers and learn more about how to tailor advertising to their interests and needs.
Impact: After piloting the game at Hult in fall 2023, “we were really surprised by the results,” Boyd said. “Students who were not necessarily fully engaged in their regular classes because of their extroverts were hooked on the simulation.”
Students can play the game at their own speed, and backend data shows that some students work slowly and methodically, while others rush to get more feedback. became. One student played her game over 100 times, including late nights on weekends, in order to get to the top of the class leaderboard.
“The good news is that they were able to explain why their campaigns did or did not meet the challenge goals,” Boyd said. “This peer learning experience is something we didn't fully expect, but we hope to emphasize it even more in our products in the future.”
After using Novela in one of his course sections, Boyd found that students performed 40% better on related topics on end-of-semester quizzes compared to students who did not use simulation. , demonstrated the power of active learning strategies.
Post-surveys showed that 100% of students recommended playing Novela and 100% of students felt confident in applying marketing principles after using the simulation.
While this experience is not a substitute for real-world work experience, students say they feel more confident in the workplace as interns because they are already familiar with the terminology and metrics commonly used at advertising agencies.
Since using it in his own classroom, Boyd has helped Novela evolve into a commercial product. It is used in face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses at other institutions, including Imperial College, London, and Columbia University.
In the future, Novela will be expanded to simulate Meta's advertising market and include the creation of fictitious brand assets from real advertising agencies. Future developments will allow students to try his B2B (brand to brand) marketing in addition to his current B2C (brand to consumer) model.
DIY: Boyd has some advice for professors looking to do something similar:
- Start small. Interactive activities don't have to be as large or require as much preparation as Novela. Any type of experiential activity can build student learning.
- Identify student interests. When creating the fictitious brand, Mr. Boyd chose to make it a luxury brand, which was more interesting to the students compared to other case studies used in class.
- Collect data. Each student has a unique journey and progression over time, so finding tools that increase visibility into how students are engaging with simulation can be valuable information.
- Discuss it with your colleagues. Whether it's Novela or other interactive activities, Boyd recommends collaborating with peers who are also trying to solve similar problems.
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