Salford Business School wins award for free online training course that helps SMEs export
Salford Business School wins award for free online training course that helps SMEs export
Monday 7 July 2014
More than 300 small and medium-sized business (SMEs) have been helped to develop business overseas by using a free online training course created by students at Salford Business School.
The students’ outstanding success was recognised at the Big Chip Awards, the largest digital awards outside London, last night (Thursday 3 July) in Manchester, where they were presented with the Little Chip Student Award.
The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in Search and Social Media Marketing for International Business was created and promoted by four MSc Marketing students – Rebecca Lee, Vanessa Van Huynh, Maria Camila Villa and Luis Santos – as part of a Business Innovation Project. These projects are embedded into the curriculum of courses at Salford Business School, as supporting SMEs is critical to its mission.
The course helps SMEs with limited time and resources develop a robust online presence and engage with international business audiences to enhance their trade prospects. It features input from academics and digital agencies such as Push On, Fast Web Media and The Candidate.
Access to free and comprehensive resources like the Salford Business School MOOC are key to SME growth, especially given research published yesterday (3rd July) by the Federation for Small Businesses, which showed that 78% of small UK businesses struggle to access support for exporting from the government.
Reflecting on their award, Maria, the team leader of the MOOC project, said: “As a team we were lucky enough to work for the pilot MOOC live project. The creation of the Search and Social Media Marketing for International Business MOOC was a challenge that was worth it and helped us to grow professionally.”
Dr Aleksej Heinze, the academic staff supervisor on the MOOC project, said: “We are really thrilled that the hard work of the students paid off. They had to organise 16 UK-based professionals to speak about digital marketing as well as promotion of the project with an international team of five universities and three SMEs. What they have created is an exceptional, free digital course of benefit to people globally – it is receiving an incredible amount of traffic to the website.”
