Prof makes mark with experiential learning

Kai-Yu Wang, Professor and Chair of the Marketing, International Business and Strategy department at the Goodman School of Business, is the 2020 recipient of the Brock University Award for Distinguished Teaching.

By Tiffany Mayer

Kai-Yu Wang is certain that before 2011, his marketing research students weren’t always interested in what he was teaching them.

But then a colleague mentioned integrating experiential learning into his classes and Wang’s world — and that of his students — changed.

Wang, Chair of the Goodman School of Business Marketing, International Business and Strategy department, connected his students with businesses from the community. Together, they would tackle real-world challenges faced by those companies, and the results would reinforce to students the concepts Wang taught while helping organizations succeed at the same time.

Except it didn’t happen that way. For the first few years, students’ timelines for completing Wang’s service-learning projects competed with the pressures of other course work. Businesses had their own deadlines to meet, and the two sides never seemed to mesh.

“To be honest, I almost gave up,” Wang recalled. “They were so much work to co-ordinate.”

Still, Wang persevered and hit his stride with experiential learning when he started teaching Goodman’s Internet and Social Media Marketing course in 2016.

He treated the working relationship between businesses and students as a partnership. Then he applied for a teaching and innovation grant, netting $2,700 to be divided between nine student teams.

The students would create social media marketing proposals for their business partners and get paid $300 to test it for two weeks. The approach was so successful that four years later, Wang has upwards of 30 businesses reaching out to him each semester to work with his class.

Even better, many of them are willing to pay upwards of $400 for students to carry out a two-week search engine marketing and social media campaign, despite being asked to contribute only $100. At the end of the two weeks, students provide instructions to the business to continue the online marketing strategy themselves.

Wang’s tenacity in providing relevant learning experiences earned him the Brock University Award for Distinguished Teaching for 2020. He’s the second business professor to win the award since its inception in 1998.

“I take teaching very seriously,” Wang said. “I enjoy teaching and spending time with students, and I enjoy teaching all the subjects I teach in the classroom.”

Still, Wang wasn’t sure his in-class approach measured up to others who’d won previously. It did.

“Prof. Wang’s dossier demonstrated his extensive educational leadership with a focus on engaging community business partners and students for experiential opportunities related to real-world topics and projects,” wrote Madelyn Law, Associate Vice-Provost, Teaching and Learning, in her announcement of Wang as the award recipient. “Also, his dedication to his own teaching and learning professional development to enhance student learning experiences was a major strength of his application.”

As rewarding as the accolades are, so too are the job offers he sees students get from some of the business partners they meet in his classes. Ditto for the thank you notes students send him because of the impact his teaching style has had on them.

“When I see these notes, I feel all the time I spent and the hard work has paid off,” he said.