Teaching

With a 15-year experience in teaching and researching for higher education (HE), I’ve been managing students’ experience (SX) variability, their compatibility with the HE services delivery, and, specifically, the course design to be pursued. I’ve designed about twenty different course syllabi so far, based on the case method and the experiential learning paradigm using simulation and other e-learning tools. Those two fashionable teaching approaches made me understand three valuable points:

1. it is important to build up a safe learning environment and to trust peers when holding discussions;
2. the case text serves as “an axiom of the fact” that enables peers to propose “hypotheses of dreams” and create their new reality;
3. simulations and e-learning tools allow students to examine and analyze interactive data to obtain insights, while the instructor acts as an researcher and is able to debrief those interactive data, making the learning process and the service delivery itself user-centered.

I am an Associate Professor in Services Marketing at MT&M College. My core interest is in Service Design methodology in particular. I apply Double Diamond Design for service design, using the following tools: 1) customer/ employee journey mapping, 2) creating customer personas, 3) prototyping, service blueprinting, business canvas modelling, 4) scenarios design of plausible service futures emphasizing storytelling. I’m also following IDEO Human-Centered Service Design and KISD’s processes. All these are based on Design Thinking.

Overwhelmingly, what I teach in Service Design as a discipline, I inductively translate as a service in course development, managing peers’ relationships with that service and its efficient operations. I materialize the fundamentals and principles of the discipline into practical exercises for students to work hands-on with and to experience beyond the case method. There is always a pre-phase of opening a method or analysis to be rehearsed, and experimenting with the technique itself live in class. I call this a concept operationalization, which I put up for initial testing and further iteration for improvement and refinement with undergraduates and postgraduates with a Marketing and IT background.

Typical issues also brought into my focus that make it into my course content in Strategic Marketing and research is the “product – market” interlinkage, which reflects in how well a product fits a customer or the service proposition they need. There the adoption of “Marketing Simulation: Managing Customers and Segments” contributed to understanding marketing strategy formation and execution. Strategic and Scenario Thinking I orient toward instructing peers to identify and analyze opportunities from a broad perspective, constructing the big picture for business cases they work on. Scenario Method I used for the purposes of my PhD thesis – “Strategic Forecasting with Scenarios in Leather Haberdashery Trade” (2006)

As a researcher, I am presently well-prepared in writing up methodology for qualitative research, based on clear goal setting and hypothesis put-forwarding. The data collection methods I use in are: surveys, interviews, observations. A survey-based quantitative (statistical) technique I teach in class for market research that helps peers determine how customers value different attributes of a product or a service is Conjoint Analysis. A powerful driver in teaching Conjoint Analysis was adopting an online-based tool “Marketing Simulation: Using Conjoint Analysis for Business Decisions”.

Key Areas of Teaching and Researching