Student Expectations Regarding Online Learning: Implications For Distance Learning Programs

What are student expectations in a traditional course versus a distance learning course? The authors analyze student course selection and expected outcomes from data collected in an undergraduate marketing course at a public university in the Northeast. Key findings reveal that students generally have a favorable predisposition towards online coursework despite their beliefs that online courses require more work and have lower learning outcomes. Further, this case study provides an initial step in better understanding student expectations in online courses as well as in the traditional classroom

A Lesson Plan for Communicating the Sustainability of an Enterprise

Sustainability is the ability to endure. For any organization or any enterprise, sustainability is the ability to remain productive long term while minimizing waste and creating value. An organization can achieve sustainability if it aligns itself with the product and service needs of its customers and wants and interests of its multiple stakeholders. The enterprise, whether it is an ecological, environmental, human, or service enterprise, must possess five “abilities” to be sustainable: availability; dependability; capability; affordability; and marketability. This paper presents a lesson plan or strategy for how an enterprise should communicate/promote sustainability to its stakeholders based on these five abilities

Can Scalability be a Marketing Liability for Sustainability?

A common principle of modern business marketing is that growth is good. It is usually thought that all businesses should market themselves with the goal of increasing their revenues and gaining market share. Scalability is developing products or services that people want and figuring out how to produce and promote many of them for lower costs while selling more of them (Dudnik 2010). It is the purpose of this paper to show that some businesses, especially small ventures with unique value propositions, should not necessarily seek to grow or scale up. There are numerous examples of new ventures failing for various reasons, and many of these have to do with growth. While new ventures frequently offer creative solutions to market needs, there are also aspects of these businesses that will be crucial to maintain while scaling up. Consequently, some new ventures may succeed based on aspects of the organization that are not feasible to scale, and thus a more conservative growth strategy should be undertaken

A Lesson Plan For Sustainability In Higher Education

Much anxiety surrounds the future of higher education in the United States. With escalating costs, tuition, and class sizes, and the increasing exclusion of many poor and minority students, higher education needs to become more accessible and sustainable. This paper defines five “abilities” for the sustainability of higher education - availability, dependability, capability, affordability, and marketability. The literature indicates that components of each of these abilities are lacking at many institutions. To remedy this problem, the authors developed a framework for sustainability based on these five abilities, and a case study at a public university in the United States was used to validate the framework’s applicability to education

Transforming Urban Public Transportation: A Lean Enterprise Approach

Much urban mass transportation is perceived as providing second-rate service, existing for the disenfranchised, and possibly not being safe.  Once, mass transit recognized and filled a need in major urban areas for efficient intra-city transportation, but people’s needs have changed.  The goal of this paper is to characterize the current state of urban mass transportation and develop a practical multi-disciplinary business-oriented approach to reenergize transit and to form the type of mass appeal that cars and passenger airlines have.  Based on a Lean Enterprise Architecture for transforming the public sector, and using global examples, the authors propose a plan of action to improve and change the image of urban mass transportation