Making it in Digital & 
Content Marketing

Between shadowing pre-project meetings between the SMEs and Program Manager (PM), I carefully reviewed all the available feedback from students and instructors alike on how they wished to improve themselves and the program as a whole, often requiring further research for me to understand the curricular connections and frameworks at play. Then, because there was so much cross-expertise among the digital and content marketing experts, I engaged the PM to chart out a project scope that would address everyone's needs before SMEs were officially onboarded. Using agile project management benchmarks, I focussed my efforts on ensuring SME availability and buy-in, while keeping project momentum. By the time we launched the project, I had prepared a comprehensive multi-stage project timeline spanning 8 months, ensuring the SMEs could complete the bulk of their work during their preferred contract period, and laying out the full breadth of expectations for all involved.

The program needed to be cohesive and interconnected, but not redundant. It was critical that the curriculum have intentional overlap in key areas to ensure students' experiences weren't interrupted when they swapped weekly between one stream's coursework to the other. So, as I corralled the group of 8 SMEs together, I started the development pathway grouped by streams, reviewing the learning journey built from their existing courses and their individual feedback, before moving into the concurrent course pairs that they would continue to collaborate closely with for the remainder of the project.

In our first session together, I introduced the timelines, the program structure, and the new integrated multi-phasic project that spanned the full program from course 2–4 in both streams. The PM and I explored several pathways to work-integrated learning (e.g., AI-generated simulations; real-life organization RFPs via Riipen), but ultimately chose this project model for its relative simplicity and learning parity for students. The project, woven through each course, would act as the core assessment strategy for the program as students invented and presented their own marketing strategies and assets centered around one of many sets of themes and conditions. With my beginner marketing knowledge, I positioned the full program blueprint proposal, leveraging principles of Cunningham's Law, to transfer project ownership to SMEs. From then on, the program blueprint became a living document where all SMEs could refer to, collaborate from, and use as the foundation for their own progression.  

Of course, merging two separate programs into a coherent whole was not just a curricular challenge, but a change management one. Going forward, I regularly met with SMEs to ensure dialogue around content coverage, learning outcomes connections, and complementary teaching approaches remained status quo. I created several short tutorial videos to allow SMEs share and access their work in a centralized environment. I then designed several workshops as springboards for key project milestones to engage, focussing on curriculum development, pedagogical excellence, and assessment design and implementation. These learning opportunities were crucial to concentrating SME resources and demonstrating my investment in their future success.

From there, my role as a curriculum guide truly took form. Not long after facilitating a workshop on curriculum development, I started to review and guide curriculum maps across all 8 courses for outcome fidelity and connectivity, integrated project flow, and several other quality criteria. Once these maps were revised, I spotlighted early examples for other SMEs to reward excellence and serve as a point of contact and reference to those who had yet to submit their own. When all maps had been completed, I led another learning session, but this time centered around lesson planning, to offer advice and promote discussion around effective lesson plan design and how to use these plans to translate the curriculum map into tangible learning activities and interactions with students. I quickly followed that session with another workshop on pedagogical excellence in the classroom, focussing on accessible use of the School's PowerPoint template that I had chiefly tailored to a teachable format. Put together, these two lessons were essential to the creation of each SME's one-lesson prototype—from lesson plan to final slideshow and learning activities. Upon completing my review of all 104 lesson plans, I then reviewed each prototypes.

When I first scoped this project—with limited resources available and a tight turnaround—I separated all remaining phases into paired review cycles. Lesson prototypes were the last project deliverable completely reviewed before a staggered course development strategy would begin. While learning sessions and initial development deadlines were identical for all courses, only 2 would be fully reviewed at a time before moving on with the next set. This way, all SMEs could continue uninterrupted, collaborate in cohorts, and receive guidance as they moved from one project sprint to the next.

At this point in , my contract with the organization came to its end. Once I had heard the news, I spent the next two weeks transitioning the project to new leadership. Onboarding the new team to the suite of SMEs in individual farewell meetings, I extended my gratitude to all project partners for their dedication to students and to their craft in marketing and education alike. Though the SMEs all readily assured us that the road ahead had already been paved and marked with plenty of signage, here are the primary steps I would have taken to wrap up the project and promote lasting program success.

For one, the workshop on assessment development was heartbreaking to pass along. The hours of research, consultation, and development work poured into the integrated project as a unilateral answer to countless curricular difficulties was not one that I took lightly. Given the chance, I would have crafted a session that afforded every SME the opportunity to share how their course took the baton and passed it along to the next to ensure unity and continuity of assessment as it followed students from one set of courses to the next. In addition, the use of presence and interactivity to strengthen bonds within each cohort and with each educator were pieces that were scaffolded into the curriculum I designed for the SMEs but had limited space to discuss in the context of their own teaching practices. I would have certainly addressed this as part of my ongoing learning experience consultation. Among other lingering items, I would have wanted to ensure quality relationships between SMEs to continue the blossoming community of practice into an educator-run cycle of program, course, and educational improvement.