Today, I received a message from one of my former students who took Marketing on the Internet with me. I would like to share his comments, then a segment of his later reply to my response to him. They are revealing, if you take what this person says to heart. I only changed his name and the name of the company that his father owned. Everything else is in his own words.

I hope all is going well.  I was a student in your class back in 2004 (Marketing on the Internet).  I went through the motions of the course but didn’t really fully understand or apply the course to the real world.  I didn’t have ambition and lacked motivation.  This was a huge mistake on my part.  The major project of the course was to create a website for an established business.  Our group chose my father’s company – JJ’s Appliance Repair.  We constructed a very well made website but I never registered the website or secured an address for it and the computer I used in College is no longer.

I was wondering if you still had this site saved in the Providence College database, or have a draft of it saved in your files.  If you do not have this I plan to create a website from scratch for my father’s business.  I realize now that the Internet is an integral piece of marketing/advertising your business properly and am seeking to help my father achieve this goal for his business.  I need to make up for what I already had at my fingertips.

Please let me know if you can help.

Sincerely,

Joe Student

To which I replied:

I remember you and your father’s business being your project. Good to hear from you, I hope everything is going your way. It is also interesting to hear your hind-sight take on the course. If you do not mind, I would like to share your message with my students this semester, I will suppress your name.

I do not have a copy of your Web site. However, in those days you kept your projects on the StudentWeb server and with some amount of luck you may be able to find it. First, remember whether it was saved under your account or one of your team mates’ account. Then check the studentweb.providence.edu to see if it is still there. It may not be. Then, you may contact the administrator of StudentWeb and see if they have a backup copy that they can resurrect. If none of this works, then you are back on square one.

Starting this semester, I am teaching the course using a freely available blog/CMS (content management system) software called WordPress ( www.wordpress.org ). I suggest that you look into that. It will make your life significantly simpler. My academic and photography Web sites both run on WordPress platform. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of “themes” that allow you to give the look you want and the content is very easy to update. Take a look at my syllabus for MOTI and read the blog section for a couple of entries on WordPress that I posted for my students. There are a couple of recommended books which you may find helpful. If you decide to take on this and try WordPress and occasionally stumble, write to me and I will try to help you out; I still have a chance to make you learn the material, better late than never!

Take care and keep in touch.

Cemal Ekin

A little after sending the above message, I heard from “Joe” who enthusiastically told me to share this story and added:

You can definitely share my message with your students. Out of embarrassment for myself please do suppress my name. I was very naïve in college and definitely took some of my courses and studies for granted. I am doing very well …
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<snip some text>
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Here is another story if you would like to use it:

I distinctly remember arguing with you about my grade at the end of the year – I think I received a C or C– or something. I completed all of the coursework and our team received a really good grade on the website and presentation. If you took into account the projects and coursework that I completed and calculated it based strictly on my grades I probably should have ended up with a strong B if not an A-. I was pretty upset to see that I had been given such a low grade. Looking back now, I think the C was gratuitous because you probably should have failed me for being stupid enough not to take the final/easiest step of getting the website on the Internet and taking advantage of the online platform for my father’s business. Looking back on my College career, all I cared about was the grade and not so much learning and understanding the work behind the grade. I guess it’s never too late – I am sure you will be hearing from me about WordPress. Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Joe

I am grateful that “Joe” wrote to me and gave me an opportunity to share his experiences during and after his college years.

Thank you Joe.