A marketing plan in education? Usually marketing plans are thought of in relation to the business world. If one thinks about it, marketing plans belong within the education sector. Distance education is becoming a very big "market" within South Dakota’s educational institutions. Teachers can "advertise" courses over the Digital Dakota Network; students can take courses from the universities around the state as well as distance classes originating out of Northern State University. If one thinks of all the possibilities for students, those teaching distance courses need a marketing plan in order to get the resource to the students. Marketing plans help organizations grow and survive. If a teacher wants his/her course to grow and survive a marketing plan can be used to help assure that this happens. There are five stages that need to be followed in developing a marketing plan for a distance course.

The course that I would like to teach via distance would be a multimedia course. The students who could take this course would be juniors or seniors from across the state of South Dakota. The students would need to be of this age so that at least two years of computer classes would have been taken by them. A skills survey would be given to prospective students to determine their skill level. Besides having a background in computer, they must also have a strong interest in more advanced computer applications - multimedia. I might possibly have to take consideration other students and evaluate them on an individual basis. These students might be in a private school or home school setting.

In order to determine if there were a need for this type of distance course I would first administer a survey to administrators around the state. Administrators need to be surveyed to determine if enough districts needed this curriculum and to identify whether or not they have the equipment and time to receive this course. After collecting the data from the administrators, juniors and seniors from the schools would then be surveyed to determine if the students themselves would be interested in the course. Once the data was compiled and it is found that this is a course students want to take, it is time to move onto stage two of the marketing plan.

This stage of the plan is to identify how to provide information to the students and administration of the schools. There are several avenues that I would used to get the information out to the stakeholders. Since this deals with the students of South Dakota the course would be posted on the DDN online distance clearinghouse. The parents, students and administration that search the clearinghouse for courses would have all the needed information at their fingertips.

I will also fax the Superintendents the information regarding the course. I realize that not all are good about reading faxes and therefore will use the state email to develop a distribution list of Superintendents, Principals and Network Administrators to email the course information too.

I will develop a brochure about the course for the school districts to run off and give to their junior and senior students who are eligible to take the course. At this point in time money is a key factor, so what is done to get the resource information out to administration and students need to be done at a low cost level therefore all options are at a minimal cost.

All of the options I plan to use to inform key people about my course are either free or very inexpensive. Posting courses to the DDN distance online clearinghouse is free. All that is needed is a key and password, which every public school in the state has. Email is free in the monetary sense, but will have a cost in relation to the time it will take to create the distribution list and the actual email itself. The brochure for the students will have a cost associated with it in order to print it and this will have to be researched.

The email message will have to be developed and distribution list created. I will have to go onto the DDN distance course clearinghouse site and create the course listing. The brochure will have to be developed using either Pagemaker or Adobe Publisher. Once the resources are created the last thing to do is to get them distributed to the administrators and students.

Although each step in the process is important to marketing a course, the fifth and final stage maybe the most important. It is important for me to collect feedback regarding the course and make revisions as necessary. The purpose of the feedback to find out if the manner in which students found out about the course was effective or not. I will need to collect this data either when the student first contacts me regarding the course, when they register for the course or on the first day of the course. The feedback that I obtain is the evaluation of the marketing plan and what worked, what didn’t and what needs to be revised.

In order for my multimedia course to be a success my marketing plan needs to be successful in providing the needed information to administrators and students around the state. I believe distance education is going to grow tremendously in South Dakota high schools over the next several years. If I develop a well thought out marketing plan for my course, I should be competitive with the other courses that are being offered and successfully attract students to take the course.