Early Career Educator
Department
Management Leadership and Marketing
Biography
Dr John Bustard lectures in Digital Transformation as part of the Management Leadership and Marketing Department within the Business School at Ulster University. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Chartered Member of the Association for Learning Technology and one of the Business School’s INSPIRE Active Learning Champions.
Impact of Work
Previously, as an award-winning start-up entrepreneur, John explored the intersection of research and practice. As Managing Director of Awakin from 2004, he led and leveraged research and development in very practical ways through embedding the process both fiscally and culturally in his company.
This led to several innovations in the application of digital technologies such as the deployment of the world's first commercially available GPS trail for tourists (BT Goldeneye Award Winner 2007 for best use of ICT) and for the development of the Titanifacts App with Northern Ireland Screen (winner at the Belfast Business Awards 2011).
John joined Ulster as a full-time PhD candidate in 2015 and became a full-time member of staff in 2018. His PhD focused on ‘The Emerging Smart Event Experience – A Many to Many Co-creation’ which led to an Impact Excellence Award in 2017. John developed RAPPORT (Rapid App Prototyping Platform and Open innovation Resource Toolkit) as part of his research and supporting digital pedagogy for IFITT.org, the leading independent global community focused on the impact of new information and communication technologies (ICT) in the travel and tourism. In April 2019 he was chosen to represent the Business School as their Active Learning Champion (ALC)
In respect of his current industry engagement, researching bots and artificial intelligence in event contexts, he suggests the most important activities of a modern lecturer and researcher are outward facing, acting as a conduit and bridge by engaging students in real-world scenarios by co-creating new learning opportunities through active learning pedagogies with policy makers, industry, society and academia (PISA).
Title
Making Students Future Ready Through Active Learning Approaches at the Digital and Marketing Nexus
Summary
This case study covers the implementation of an innovation inspired module design (Curran and Murphy, 2019) of Digital Marketing which seeks to engage today’s cloud native, device savvy students in more practice-based approaches to today’s wider marketing challenges (Beetham and Sharpe, 2013).
The Quadruple Helix Model (QHM) of innovation (West and Bogers, 2017) provided an appropriate framing to integrate insights and activities and embed knowledge opportunities related to Policy, Industry, Society and Academia (PISA) within an Active Learning pedagogy (Timmermans and Meyer, 2017). The outcome has been an increase to 25% over the university average of students who strongly agreed their overall experience was positive (see figure 1 in Further Information).
One student recounted that “the coursework was fun & interesting & applies to outside of uni.” Further examples of feedback are presented in ‘Further Information’ section.