amit klein

Social Media and Web 2.0 is all about the collaborative, bidirectional flow of information.  It’s no longer a brand, company or authority figure dictating the rules.  As part of the course I’m teaching at NMIMS and ISB, I’m trying to apply the same principals and ask the students to help shape the class.   Here are some examples of what we are doin’:

• We have a fairly active Google Wave which covers the course goals and meeting notes.  Students are free to edit the course outline, ask questions and suggest topics for future classes (please note you must be logged in to Google for this to work… the embed API is also fairly new – i.e. buggy):

• We have a few really awesome guest speakers including:
  • Maneesh Madambath – Founder of Smursh reviewing current trends in Social Media
  • Guarav Mishra – CEO 2020 Social discussing using social advertising to recruit members into brand communities
  • Vaibhav Arya – CTO of Skezno giving an overview of paid online advertising
  • Brian Burns – Founder of SpeakWell Communications discussing copywriting for the web
  • Adam Sachs – Co-founder of Ignightr talkin’ ’bout creating an investor pitch
  • Ninad Raval – UX Lead at Directi discussing Web Analytics and A/B Testing
  • Lauren Vargas – Community Manager at Radian6 discussing social media monitoring
  • What’s Web 2.0ey about this is that half the speakers are based in the US and will be conducting their sessions via skype/video conferencing.
• Rather then a preassigned reading list, the students are being asked to share a few links weekly with each other via Twitter and Wave.
• Students can ask questions/make suggestions/provide their own examples (via twitter and wave) during the class.
• The students will be partnering with a local NGO to raise awareness or solicit donations for a social cause using social media and an SEM campaign (hopefully Yahoo! and Google will come through and donate some ad credits).  These projects will be posted publicly.

Other things I could be/should be doing:

• Posting the course outline (as a wave) and inviting everyone whose registered for the ISB course to make their edits/suggestions (for topics or speakers)/questions/modifications prior to the start of the course.
• Reaching out to students in these universities ahead of time (via Twitter) to build some hype and make sure the class is filled up.

Anyone else have any ideas on how to make the course better?  Let me know…