Marketing Your Class

By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL

Have you ever worked hard to create a terrific course only to have it canceled because not enough students signed up? Two of your Valpo colleagues, Richard Sévère and Selina Bartels, share some great ideas for how to get the word out about your outstanding courses.

Richard Sévère, Interim Associate Dean and English Department

For Richard, marketing your course begins with the course description. Consider choosing a title/topic that challenges perceptions about your field such as The History of Baseball, English 200: Video Games, Playing with Stories or The Economics of Race & Gender. Then write a short interesting course description (75 words or less) that will appeal to students. Consider running it by the student writing center consultants to get their feedback.

Richard also suggests brainstorming at a department meeting to come up with intriguing topics that communicate the breadth of your discipline. Also, consider creating a department-level list of this year’s classes to use for advising. The list should have titles, descriptions, and meeting times. You can also share this list with other, related departments, with prospective students, and with the listserve for Focus.

Consider having everyone in your department create a very short video via YouTube (20-30 seconds) to introduce yourselves, show some of your personality, and highlight your speciality. Have a basic script for people to follow such as: name, what you teach, what you love about your discipline. Be sure to inject some humor. Here is a example: https://www.valpo.edu/english/about/faculty/martin-buinicki/

Richard also suggested a department newsletter. The English department newsletter is student-edited and written. It comes out just 1-2 times a year and is sent (online) to alumni and current majors. Each issue highlights one class and one professor. Print copies are given out to prospective students and shared at Books & Coffee events. Here is their latest issue: https://www.valpo.edu/english/files/2022/02/Fall-2021-Lodestar-Digital-Final.pdf

Richard recommends investing in an eye-catching poster for your class. It could be created by your own students or by students in marketing or graphic design. He sends copies to residential life to post in the dorms, and to the Union to post on bulletin boards. If you create a panoramic version, you can also send your poster to the viewing screens in buildings. All you need to do is email it to the building managers, such as Isis Drosos for ASB. For recurring classes, you can even frame these posters and put them up in hallways in your department.

Finally, consider your first class meeting as one final marketing opportunity. Richard thinks that the first five minutes are the most important, so be energetic, welcoming, and greet students as they enter the room. Instead of a syllabus day, make this first meeting a chance to dig right in. Plan an interactive, engaging activity that has them performing your discipline, not just hearing about it.

Selina Bartels, Education Department

Selina suggests that you consider how your class fits into the gen ed requirements. Then, in your course description, be sure to highlight how your class would round out the student’s gen ed profile. If your class is an elective, explain how it can fulfill their curiosity about the world or complement their major.

She agrees with Richard about using flyers and video screens to market your courses. But she urges you not to neglect printed course descriptions. For example, Selina noticed students thumbing through and talking excitedly about a pamphlet with descriptions of each of the Core pilot options for this semester.

Selina suggests marketing your class or program in other classes or departments. For example, each semester she does a mock lesson during a GS-150 class (Exploratory Studies). Selina also pointed out that every student majoring in education (currently 80 students) must minor in another discipline. So consider presenting your program at an education department event. Or reach out to students in other departments that might be a good fit for your class. If you are teaching a science fiction course, market it to science majors. You can also reach out to the academic advisors for those departments.

Selina proposes going directly to students via social media. Create an instagram post about your class. Ask IMC what hashtags Valpo students use the most and market your class there. Or target the hashtags used by our large sorority/fraternity population.

Look at similar courses in other departments. For example, Selina noticed that Valpo had both a Diversity in Education course and also a Diversity in Social Work course. Both classes were under-enrolled. Now they have a joint diversity class that enrolls up to 40 students. She also noticed that both Education and English had a course on children’s literature. Now they just cross-list the English department course and co-market it. That class now enrolls around 16 education majors and 12 English majors.

Finally, the Education department uses a google spreadsheet to lay out students’ departmental coursework for a full four years. That allows them to know how many students will need to take a certain class each year. So they can plan to offer courses only in the year in which they will get the most enrollment.

In conclusion, there is a lot you can do to make more students aware of your outstanding courses. So consider picking just one or two of the strategies outlined above and watch your enrollments rise!