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Digital Marketing skills course shortlisted for awards

Friday 22 April 2016

A free online course designed by The University of Salford in collaboration with four European universities to help employees of the future develop their digital marketing presence has been shortlisted for three major digital media awards.

Launched in September 2015, the Digital and Social Media Marketing MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) helps people who want a career in business to develop their individual as well as professional online skills, aimed at boosting international trade prospects. Students from 86% of countries across the globe signed up to it.

Marketed using #passion4digital, over 14,000 students signed up to the course and now it has been shortlisted in two categories in the European Search awards and one in the Digital Leaders 100 awards.

The uniqueness of this course is threefold:

It is bringing a European perspective to the North America dominated digital marketing world.

It is a developed by a partnership between five European universities (Bulgaria, Greece, Lithuania, Poland and the UK) as well as informed by advice from The Candidate Ltd who are UK based experts in digital marketing recruitment and a European MOOC platform iversity.

The course offers a practical blogging platform for learners to practice what they learned on the course.

It was expected that about 3,000 students would sign up to the course, but word of mouth from those who took part drove sign ups much higher, and included entries from 168 countries around the world.

Course designer, Dr Aleksej Heinze of The University of Salford, said: “It is fantastic that our course has been recognised in this way. It filled a great need to help businesses develop their digital skills in the fast changing online world.”

“The online marketplace has no conventional country borders, people hundreds or even thousands of miles away can be interested in a product or service and the MOOC helps business tap into that demand. It is creating huge opportunities for those businesses that use it in the right way. Our course helped to spread those skills and the fact that students from 168 different countries around the globe were involved shows just how relevant it was.”

Voting is open now for the Digital Leaders Award and the winner will be announced on June 15. The #passion4digital MOOC in shortlisted in the Digital Inclusion and Skills Initiative of the Year category.

The European Search Awards will be announced in Paris on May 4 and the Digital and Social Media Marketing MOOC is nominated in both the Best Use of Search – Third Sector and Best Low Budget Campaign categories.

As part of the course participants were shown how having a better-informed digital online profile could be used for career development. And businesses could learn how to develop a more robust online presence and engage with international audiences to enhance international trade prospects.

The MOOC was developed as part of the Joint European Masters (JEMSS) project funded under the Lifelong Learning programme. The MOOC comprised of 48 videos containing theoretical background from academic staff, as well as industry insights from key professional speakers. Each video was accompanied by activities, designed to help put that theory into practice.

 

EU logoThrough the JEMSS project (#passion4digital MOOC) has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. 

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Sam Wood

0161 295 5361