Why Do Digital Teaching Innovations So Often Fail?

Abstract

In a dynamic field, university marketing educators ought to harness new digital tools and social media platforms successfully in the curriculum, but evidence of its widespread adoption is meager (Tuten & Marks, 2012). By explicitly investigating exemplars of pedagogic innovation failure, this research paper analyses faculty and digital marketing student perspectives on the use of digital tools and social media for formal learning. This research paper makes a case to dispel the unhelpful narrative of technophobic instructors struggling to teach homogeneous tech savvy digital natives, but to recognise a nuanced continuum of digital capabilities, for both students and instructors. Educators should seek to collaborate with students to choose how they interact using digital tools, recognising the importance and diversity of public-private boundaries and consider the need for this to take place beyond the gaze of faculty.