Bringing Excitement to Learners Working With Real-Life Clients

Abstract

Getting students engaged in their education involves a wide variety of teaching strategies and techniques that offer opportunities for acquiring and applying knowledge and developing skills that will benefit them in their careers. The current chapter describes the experiences of students of the Fundamentals of Marketing course when working with real-life clients (RLC) in Southern Manitoba as they developed a marketing plan for local small and medium-sized companies. As the data collecting is still ongoing in order to obtain extensive and comprehensive results, the process of organizing and launching the “Connections Project” is related here. Also considered are the pedagogical benefits of challenging students to apply the theory into a real market situation and the challenges such an endeavor like this might face. The results seen thus far show that, despite the extra work for the faculty instructors, students, and companies involved, the experience is worthy and should be continued for years to come.