Student Participation and Interaction in Online Case-Based Discussions: Comparing Expert and Novice Facilitation

Discussion is an essential component in case-based learning (CBL), as it offers students the opportunity to consider diverse perspectives, clarify confusion, and construct understanding. As a facilitator bears most of the responsibility for the overall success of CBL, understanding how facilitation strategies influence interactions during discussions is worthwhile. However, previous CBL facilitation research has primarily considered student perspectives during case discussions, without examining relationships between facilitator experience and student interaction and participation. This study combined social network analysis and content analysis to compare the structure of expert and novice instructors’ discussion posts and to consider their relationship to student participation and interaction in online case discussions. Results showed that both the expert and novice instructors used facilitation strategies involving social congruence, cognitive congruence, and content expertise frequently in the discussions; however, when and how they used a combination of these strategies was noticeably different. These differences influenced student interaction. More specifically, students tended to interact with others more actively and densely as a result of questions initiated by the expert facilitator. Suggestions are provided for novice facilitators.

Experiential Purchase Quality

Experiential purchases, such as movies, theme parks, and vacations, represent a unique, and exceedingly popular, type of marketing behavior. Despite the increasing popularity of purchased experiences, the question of what makes one experiential purchase superior to another remains elusive. Using a multimethod, grounded theory approach, the authors perform two qualitative studies that reveal high-quality experiential purchases are composed of five dimensions: uniqueness, fun, escapism, servicescape quality, and social congruence. Next, an empirical model of experiential purchase quality (EPQ) and its outcome variables is tested in two different settings. The results find support for the EPQ conceptualization and uncover that a high-quality experiential purchase can positively influence braggart word of mouth, nostalgia, and self-connectedness to the experience while also lowering price consciousness perceptions to repeat the experience. A comparison of short and long experiences found that customers put a heavier weighting on concepts such as escapism and social congruence in shorter experiences where longer experiences had a heavier emphasis on the servicescape and perceptions of fun. From a managerial perspective, our results highlight that a one-size-fits all approach in experiential management is problematic. Managers need to understand that customers have different evaluative criteria depending on the length of an experiential purchase.

Pulling It Together and Stretching It Beyond

This book has shown which tunes had disproportionate long-run appeal based on social congruence, which gave a dynamic structure to jazz as a market category. In particular, it has examined the role of geography and organizations in determining which of those “million” have shaped jazz through their ascension into the discographical canon of recordings. This concluding chapter considers the implications of the book's findings for a conceptual model of product appeal in emerging markets in which meaning and value are dynamically constructed. It first draws out generalizations and scope conditions of the overall results before discussing contexts outside cultural markets where the book's ideas should be informative, such as the markets for nanotechnology, green technology, and software. Finally, it describes the market for bottled water and emphasizes the ways that the marketing and packaging of different bottled waters influence our notion of what is good (or appealing).