Passion and progress: Inspiring the next generation of digital marketers

Kardi Somerfield, Senior Lecturer and Program Leader, BA Advertising and Digital Marketing at the University of Northampton, tells us about her approach to teaching digital marketing and why she always tries to go the extra mile for her students.

We’re designing a Masters course in Digital Marketing to follow on from our undergraduate Advertising and Digital Marketing degree – and of course for practitioners who want to gain a Masters-level qualification.

The challenge is to have a clear vision of what the course should be and then get into the detail of how to deliver it. I'm absolutely passionate about experiential learning, to learn through experience and reflecting on those experiences.

Thank goodness we're back to face-to-face learning now because being able to look each other in the eye is so important. I just try to make sure my excitement about the subject translates.

Not everybody has the same teaching or learning style - personally I try to design the course to be taught in ways I know people find engaging, but it’s a collaborative thing. Some people are analytical or strategic while others come from a creative or communications background, so we're building a course that gives some scope for people to cover all of these different sides.

There are aspects to studying at University that are different to simply taking a training course in an area – we are including more ethical and philosophical aspects as week as postgraduate level research skills - that's an example of what makes it Masters level.

We’re expecting it to be ready for September and it would be of interest to employers who may be looking to take on somebody who's completed a Masters in Digital Marketing, or they might even be looking to top up their own qualifications with a specialist Masters level programme.

Digital diversity is such an important and interesting field. One of the interesting things about developing curriculum is that you can see things emerging in practice and address them – for example a module I’ll be writing is called ‘Digital Diversity’, covering everything on accessibility, exploring things like how AI can have bias and algorithms can have unconscious bias - how people can be disadvantaged by some of that black box stuff through to designing for inclusivity and even down to how we hire. I don't think I've seen that in any other digital marketing course.

These are the kind of questions and challenges that anybody who's actually working in the field will be coming across. I’m working on a student project with Channel 4 about this at the moment.

University is about more than just learning to do a job - it's about coming out afterwards into the world with a changemaker attitude towards ethics and social impact. So I think we should cover digital diversity. It's quite differentiating, and I'm super excited about writing that.

When you have your course planned out and you're a couple of months into it, sometimes a development will emerge and you’ll realise you really need to talk about it.

Take something like ChatGPT and other AI tools, for example - suddenly everybody is talking about it, so as lecturers in the digital space we need to be tuned in and can then bring that into the room as a discussion and a tool. That's the beauty of it, we can be opportunistic and respond to the environment and talk about it.

Often the students will be ahead of us so we're all learning together, but we can make sure that we include things like ethics into that exploration, or contextualise it with theory so it’s a thoughtful process.

Speaking of grabbing opportunities, we're just about to do our second VR project for the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner’s Office. Last year we got a rather last-minute opportunity to get our hands on VR equipment as part of a collaboration with the PFCCO.

Because it fitted with the learning outcomes of one of the modules, we were able, even at quite a late stage in the game, to make that a project as part of our course - because it was just an amazing opportunity.

Sometimes it's about spotting opportunities and running with that - we have the flexibility to do that in some modules. Learning to learn is such a key skill if you're going to be a digital marketer, because we can teach the students how to use any platform but in three years' time, that's not the platform they'll be working on - it changes all the time.

It's not about learning this coding language or that piece of software - it's more about being open and adaptable because we've all got to learn all the time.

We might invest loads of time and effort in figuring out how to create a virtual reality experience, and we might never do that again.

But if the students also reflect on how they approached learning that kit, then when they have to learn how to build an app, or how to use AI to solve a problem, it will help them enormously.

You have to be receptive to learning different things. The digital ecosystem we have in Northamptonshire is so important to help make things happen - it's all about being connected to one another.

An opportunity happens when, using the example of the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner's Office, their relationship is with the security and estates teams at the university, and they in turn are connected to me.

External connections make things possible, but it's also the internal connections across a big organisation like a university.

I also think you've got to keep moving forward. To be honest, I could choose to do my job the easy way. Instead, I choose to do it this way.

That's because I've got to care about what I'm doing, I've got to be excited and I want to learn things.

When you try to keep moving forward so that you're interested in what you're doing, it is contagious. As lecturers, we have the power to make the learning experience interesting or dull. I choose interesting!

David BevanDigital Northants stories