Tertiary education is entering a new era. The school and college as physical locations for the dissemination of knowledge and the support of learning, are now waning to a new virtual environment, the electronic classroom, which provides an open, interactive, online-support, authentic, electronic communication, and multimedia-rich learning center. The potential for the creation and maintenance of electronic classroom is now well recognized. The leverage of microelectronics, computer networks, information technology, computing and telecommunications that is enabling the emergence of the "virtual community" have accrued substantial benefits for flexible university education, distant learning and vocational training.

The purpose of our project is to utilize the power of newly developed technology on the business education, a field which grows more competitive in Hong Kong in recent years. To accomplish the task, we have proposed several Internet application tools including E-mail, Bulletin Board, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Newsgroup, and World Wide Web (WWW) as the communication vehicles for the EC. Since the original inception of the Internet and its subsequent development into a non-academic specific medium, there has been a shift in emphasis away from the text-based communication such as e-mail and discussion lists to the increasingly multimedia-based WWW. To be a reflection of current technological trends with respect to the execution of marketing activities within the Greater China region, our project has changed the platform to be web-based.

At the present moment, there are four web-based instructional courses administered by the project leader. These include Marketing Management, Advertising and Promotion Management,  China Marketing on Internet, and Internet Marketing. To facilitate the free exchange of information among students, instructor, and online sources, each course has set up hyperlinks in the syllabus to course instructor, classmates, textbook author(s), online marketing information sources, online cases, and other course archives. The postings of student projects and papers, academic vitae, FAQ on project, and other activities such as graduation ceremony have encouraged students for electronic publication.  This  serves as a powerful motivation force for students, which leads to improve their learning effort and sharing of knowledge (Tang and Lee 1998).

With regard to student benefits from the project, a number of MBA students have made usage of the web facilities.  They worked on topics such as Internet web sites promotion (Cheung Wai Leung and Shao Yuk Yin 1998), Internet banking (Chan Wing Fung 1997), Internet trading (Danny Po 1997), Internet shopping (Jonathan Leung and Carol Wan 1997), and lifestyle of Internet users (Sam Yew 1997).  (All the above- mentioned MBA projects are available at CUHK Library.) These students represent the very first to receive tangible benefits that help them bring realism and authentic experience to tackle real business world problems. As students become more familiar with what resources are  available, we estimate that an increasing number will be looking to base their research projects around subjects emanating from this field.

Reference:
Edwin Tang and Lee Fong Lok (1998) "Beyond the Classroom Walls - Using the Internet for Marketing Courses" in Global Chinese Conference on Computer in Education '98, pp.257-261.