The Library as a client in enhancing student industry-oriented learning

The professional project

In the 3rd year of the BA in Digital Marketing programme offered by the Faculty of Business, students are expected to undertake a major professional project. This is an all semester project, running for 15 weeks and has 10 credits.

• The purpose of this module is to give students experience of carrying out a substantial industry-oriented digital marketing project.
• This project gives the students an opportunity to take responsibility for an entire project life-cycle and to produce an agreed set of deliverables for a client, which in this case was TU Dublin Library Services.
• The project enables students to gain practical experience of the application of knowledge in a professional setting, to integrate knowledge and skills acquired from all parts of the degree, and to provide a context within which to further develop their professional practice.

The assessment of project

The practice and assessment of this project is designed to support the student as they acquire and demonstrate a variety of hard and soft skills through the mentorship of the client (Library Services). The demonstration of the acquired learning include:

• A project plan: which identifies the key deliverables and timeline for the project
• A showcase presentation showcasing what they have learn
• A reflection of their learning journey and overall performance 

Library Services as the client

• Having been identified as a potential client - the next step was to confirm this position and a meeting was arranged between the lecturer and the Library Services (represented by the Assistant Head of Client & Faculty Service, Business Librarian and a member of the Communications team).

• It was agreed that the library would work as a client to the Digital Marketing students and the focus was on generating content for the promotion of selected library resources via the Library's Social Media platform. 

• In summary, students would pick a theme, select resources from our collections and develop a promotional campaign for these resources. There was a multi faceted benefit for the students in that they would develop their marketing skills, while also developing their information literacy skills, and awareness of our collections.  

• 3 students were assigned to the Library, thus we acted as their industry ‘client’. The students would be working individually on their projects. The library agreed to take on 3 individual projects.  

• The library was given the "Digital Marketing Professional Project Handbook" so that we would have a full understanding of the scale and scope of what we had signed up for.