Paradigm Shifts in Business Education: Using Active Learning to Deliver Services Marketing Content

Business schools have recently been criticized for failing to prepare students for the increasingly complex, fast-paced, and global work environments they will face as employees of organizations in the 1990s and beyond. Students must be taught both new content and new skills in order to meet the changing needs of U.S. businesses. Services marketing is a prime example of the new content that must be added to business school curricula, since services now account for more than 70% of our GNP Services marketing courses can also provide an excellent opportunity for students to practice critical new workplace skills. The objectives of this article are to describe the changes necessary in marketing curricula to ensure that students have the appropriate skills and content to adequately meet the needs of their future employers; to provide an overview of services marketing course content; to describe the traditional and the active learning educational paradigms; to demonstrate how active learning techniques can be used to teach both content and skills in a services marketing course; and to provide specific examples of active learning exercises designed to address key content areas in services marketing.