Introduction to Marketing

This course on Marketing is a marketing disaster for WhartonOnline. This course made me understand atleast one thing in great clarity, that I should not waste money on Wharton courses. The amount of effort put into the course material, into the organization and flow of material (or lack thereof), and into the quality of videos and content delivery, would sum up right about to Zero. Needless to say, this review is going to be highly critical, since I expected some value and quality from a school like Wharton. Should you pay $95 for this course. I think they should pay you for wasting your time. The course tries to teach the importance of branding, and customer centricity, and personifies how not to do it.

Here are some specific complaints I have with the course, in no particular order. You might not agree with all of them, and some might seem insignificant, but in any case, here they are :

1. Platform : The entire course is just a series of videos, and plenty of them are over 15 minutes long. It's hard to imagine that students would be able to keep their attention, and grasp new and/or tough concepts with such an approach. A combination of text, figures, videos, and interactive exercises would have made it much easier to grasp the material

2. Videos : High school kids can make multimedia of better quality. Videos consist of someone talking for several minutes, with occasional inclusion of presentation slides. Slides are no help either. It seems material is copied out of a text book, then pasted into a slide, and then integrated into a video. And then professor spends a few minutes reading out the text of the slides. The diagrams are lifeless, asymmetrical and does not help advance the understanding.

3. Structure : The order in which videos are presented doesn't make sense. There is no structure to the material which would help you understand the concepts in a logical and progressive manner. Sometimes, the heading of the video does not even seem to match with the content. It feels all videos were filmed in an ad hoc fashion and then just put together in a random order.

4. Discussion Forum is not a great help either. You would want to see more activity and brainstorming there, considering so many students take this course. But, there is no incentive for the students to share ideas and contribute, since passing the course does not depend on discussion forums. When "Mentors" reply to some answers, those answers seemed to be pasted out of a text book.

5. Quiz : In its current structure, there is no point of having a quiz at the end of the week. The goal should be assimilating or internalizing the material and concepts, not just pass the quiz. The course allows you to retake a quiz upto 3 times a week, so you don't really need to go through the videos at all. They don't check if you went through all the videos before taking the quiz. And they don't give you answers and explanation after the quiz is done, since then the students would always score 100% on the second try. If I can not even understand where my understanding lacks and fix it, why am I taking this quiz.

8. Final Exam : You can find answers to most questions by just searching the key phrase in the course material. And they help you in doing that by telling you which Professor's videos you need to search. They don't test you on concepts, they test you whether you can remember what the Professor X meant when he/she made a statement Y.

9. Content Delivery: I found second week to be the best in terms of content delivery, but the rest of the weeks were more or less lacking. The examples or analogies given did not always match the concept introduced. If you read the transcript of the videos, the sentences spoken would not even make much sense. Many times, you can find the professor glancing down, as if looking at the laptop screen besides her, to read out the slides. The professor comes out as nervous and fidgety, which is very distracting, to say the least.

If you are still reading this review, I hope you would spend your $95 on a subscription to a business magazine, or may be just on some good food. This course is definitely not worth it, and it 'll cost you more in your precious time.

This course is an absolute joke, as well as the staff. Besides the course being completely unstructured and feeling like it was done by a child who scraped the internet with a text spinner software and not a real University professor at all, my biggest issue with it is the staff.

I posted a question on the forum regarding the course material and the response I received from the official "Mentor" was to "google it". When I pointed out that this is what I am taking a Wharton course for, to not have to "google it" and get stuck in some dubious sources, and that this is no way for a Higher Education institution to conduct their education they simply deleted the entire thread and any trace of it.

I don't recommend spending your money on this course unless you want to be served a poor excuse for a content and have yourself be ignored when you have questions about it.

The depth of material was appropriate for an introductory course, and I think the entire course can be completed in a week. Very informative and helpful.

Barbara Kahn gave the lectures on branding, marketing strategy and brand positioning (weeks 1 and 4). Peter Fader gave the lectures on customer centricity (week 2). David Bell gave the lectures on market strategies (week 3).

I found Barbara Kahn's lectures the clearest and most structured with tons of useful concrete information. Peter Fader was second in place. I found David Bell's lectures difficult to follow, and it felt like he was regularly going off on tangents. I was taking notes through the course and managed to get structured ones for Barbara Kahn and Peter Fader, but my notes for David Bell do not really flow and connect.

Lastly, I think it would help if David Bell tried to neutralize his New Zealand accent. It was perfectly understandable but somehow fatiguing, and I stopped watching the lectures and just read the transcripts after 15 mins into his videos.

As someone who is practicing in the field already, this was a great refresher.

However, for someone just starting to learn about Marketing, I feel as though this will be hard to learn from because it's not very engaging.

I will say the information is great and this is packed with tons of useful information!

For the sake of learning you will need to do some work on your part as a student to get the most out of it.

1. Take hand written notes.
2. Screen shot the slides.
3. Read the optional material they give for free.
4. Honestly try your best on the activities and pop-up questions.
5. Re-take the quizzes if you do not get them 100% right.

Some concepts will be sure to stick.