Launching a new online Advertising degree in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

In Spain, there were 35 degrees in Advertising and Public Relations in the 2019-2020 academic year, with only three of them being taught online. Online learning facilitates educational personalization, as students progress according to their ability, interests, hobbies, learning pace, family and social circumstances, something that proved to be vital in the context of a health pandemic. This study shares the experience of starting a new online degree in Advertising in times of Covid-19, as well as the best practices implemented in its first academic year (2020-2021), in such an exceptional context. Whereas the university has been providing online instruction for ten years, the pandemic made it face new circumstances, such as a younger student profile. This paper describes how the key competences of this first year of study were addressed: developing oral communication skills, teamwork and the ability to conceptualize. It focuses both in the design of the contents and in the preparation of the live sessions in a pandemic context. At the end of this first term, the degree achieved a student satisfaction score of 8.67/10.