Digital Marketing School
The other day I came across the Digital Marketing School and I found it to be a great idea and a great example of a free service.
The online marketing company vStream have set up The Digital Marketing School to be a free online video resource for anyone who has an interest in the world of digital marketing, from a beginners level, right up to seasoned professionals. It’s the first time in Ireland that SME’s, and in particular start-ups, will have an online consultancy resource, that’s absolutely free of charge.
The lessons are short and to the point. Today I have learned about the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Display Advertising and VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) from Andrew Jenkinson and about Viral Video from Niall O’Driscoll and all of this in only 2 – 3 min lessons. It definitely beats standing in a classroom for an hour.
I love the idea of people sharing their knowledge and I strongly believe that people like Niall O’Driscoll and Andrew Jenkinson who are experts in their domain and passionate about their work are the best to teach about Digital Marketing.
I would like you to take a moment now and think back in time and remember your college experience when you really loved maths or biology or any other subject. Now try to remember the lecturer: his way of teaching and the way he spoke about the subject. How many of you remember the subjects and the lecturers because of their passion for what they were teaching?
In today’s schools we have lecturers teaching entrepreneurship without ever being an entrepreneur, marketing without ever working as a marketer, programming without ever working as a programmer and the list can go on.
I really believe that we should learn from people like Andrew and Niall and people like them should be invited to teach the students in today’s secondary schools and universities.
What are your thoughts on this? How could we get more career people to offer their time and teach about their passion?
July 23rd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Just read this yesterday on Paul Graham’s RAQ’s (Rarely-Asked Questions) list:
I’m about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?
The best teachers I remember from school had three things in common:
(1) They had high standards. Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won’t respect the teachers who don’t call them on it.
(2) They liked us. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It’s hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can’t think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students.
(3) They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren’t really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.
http://www.paulgraham.com/raq.html