Community-based methods and applied learning practices

21st-century marketing students seek several key features, e.g., personalised learning; equity, diversity, and inclusivity; learning through doing; community relationships; technology; work-readiness and teacher professionalisation when choosing a course (or even a subject) (Le, 2020; Steiner and Hyman, 2010). That means marketing lecturers need to utilise everything that is important in today's world (and more) so that students can learn the right tools to prosper in their life and workforce. Following this viewpoint, we designed our post-gard introductory marketing subject (MKT501). The subject was part of the Transformation Online Learning (TOL) framework, which was initiated by the university to offer more value to our online students). The framework used a curriculum design process to facilitate student learning, with interactions between student to student, student to teacher and student to content, and ‘student to community learning’. Our curriculum design process covered all four components, with a vast focus on the ‘student to community learning’ to facilitate opportunities for our marketing students to learn from each other and the broader community as part of their learning journey. Research (Lawson, 2005; DeFilippis, 2001) shows that people with similar ideas and a shared community voice may solve significant societal issues (e.g., inclusivity). With this thought, we developed assessments emphasising currency, authenticity, and engagement with organisations, institutions, and the broader community. We combined the concepts of immersive and active learning models (Bhattacharjee et al., 2018; Dengel and Mägdefrau, 2019) with building our community-based learning approach. In our immersive virtual Learning spaces, we highlighted the concept of “community presence” using a range of asynchronised digital tools and synchronised engagements. Through our reflective practise, we have developed a conceptual model to illustrate our community-based applied learning approach.