Teaching Marketing Classes with WordPress

To manage the content of my marketing classes at Sonoma State University I use WebCT, which is a stupid piece of s that doesn’t f’ing work, and WordPress, which rocks.

Marketing educators continue to use content management systems like Blackboard that are different than the most popular content management systems used in the real world.  Why?  I guess it’s because educational content management systems are designed to share private class content such as the class syllabus and student grades, but it’s probably more likely due to the fact that the company that owns Blackboard spent a lot of money marketing its products to colleges and universities.  WordPress doesn’t have marketing people calling up colleges and universities telling them to buy it and use it–WordPress is open source and free.

I’m going to the Marketing Educators’ Association 2010 Conference to talk about teaching marketing classes with WordPress:

WordPress’s numbers on its webpage wordpress.org/about (updated after publication) are impressive:

“In 2006 we had 1,545,703 downloads, in 2007 we had 3,816,965!”  To install the WordPress software, users download it from WordPress.org.  “As for plugins we had 191,567 downloads of 371 unique plugins in 2006. In 2007 there were 2,845,884 downloads (15x growth) of 1,384 plugins.”  Plugins are applications developed by programmers that can be downloaded and used for free. Just as iPhone apps have made the iPhone popular, the proliferation of WordPress plugins has helped make WordPress popular.  “2006 saw the introduction of the first WordCamp in San Francisco…There are now dozens of WordCamps around the world, from Vancouver to Dallas to Milan, Italy.”  WordCamp is a WordPress conference where WordPress developers and users get together.  WordPress is hot–it is free, open source, and has a community of developers that support it.

WordPress receives high scores in Internet polls and is reviewed highly when content management systems are compared side-by-side.  WordPress is becoming the CMS of choice to run many major Websites and blogs.  In early 2008, the blog search engine Technorati analyzed its top 100 blogs and found WordPress to be the CMS that dominates the list.

If a marketing educator shares their class content and lectures online with WordPress, local and online marketing practitioners are more likely to notice what a marketing educator is doing in their classroom because communication occurs through links, pingbacks, and trackbacks.

Using WordPress as a CMS encourages a marketing educator to learn marketing skills such as domain name registration, web hosting, file transfer protocol, database management, HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, creating media, publishing media, Web analytics, search engine optimization, and social media.

As an aside, there’s the whole issue about rating teacher performance.

If teacher ratings were based in part on the quality of their content via web traffic, twitter followers, iTunes subscribers, etc. I think that a lot more teachers would want to use a popular content management system.