Educational Risk: Lessons Learned during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT The outbreak of COVID-19 was a major disruption to higher education and marketing education across the globe. COVID-19 impacted not only our campuses, but also how we teach and our students. As marketing academicians, we must respond to the educational risk posed to COVID-19 to facilitate educational success in the future. We conducted an exploratory survey of 118 marketing department chairs in the U.S. representing all regions of the country in August and September of 2020. The survey data provides valuable insights into how marketing department chairs perceive educational risk and challenges under COVID-19 and how they established coping strategies, to mitigate risk including internal efforts, benchmarking, communications, and the implementation of technological/instructional support. We then examine the effects of COVID-19 on the adjustment of teaching plans for Fall 2020, marketing course content, and job placement. Finally, we explore how to improve satisfaction with the risk management process while setting best practices to move forward under COVID-19. We found that overall the satisfaction with the COVID-19 management process was high, communicating about COVID-19 on the institution’s website increased perceived educational risk, and the departments that benchmarked produced higher satisfaction with the process rankings by faculty.