Student-led Workshops on Youtube: When Students Become Instructors

Written by Claire Son and Sarah Borsaly

Edited by Cailin Kuchenbecker, Andrea Escobar-Vara, and Jillian Munoz     

March 17, 2021

       As the university continued with virtual instruction into the 2020-2021 academic year, the CCIDM re-evaluated how we could add value to the campus and business community in an online environment. Center interns created the CCIDM Virtual Workshop Series to address this challenge, which gives an interactive look into important topics related to customer insights, digital marketing, and analytics. Center students become experts in the topic they present and share that knowledge in a virtual workshop as a culminating experience. These workshops have been made accessible for the campus and business communities on the Center’s YouTube channel. “It's a great experience to be a part of the creation and presentation of virtual workshops, as it allows the Center and the AMI Club to develop skills and connect with others at Cal Poly Pomona and outside organizations,” stated Research Assistant Grant Chic.

       The CCIDM Virtual Workshop Series is separated into two categories: data analytics and digital marketing. The data analytics category houses the six-part R Workshop Series presented by the Center’s former Junior Marketing Scientist, Jarrod Griffin. This series was hosted in collaboration with the Analytics and Marketing Insights (AMI) Club and provides an in-depth look at the uses of R. The R Workshop Series covers the basics of R as well as web scraping, Git and GitHub, Data Wrangling, Tidyverse, logical operators, custom R functions, data visualization, and much more. Nearly 100 Cal Poly Pomona students, faculty, and staff attended these workshops live, including some members of the business community. Griffin has since expanded his R offerings by adding a hands-on Text Mining with R. In the workshop, he accesses Twitter posts and explains how to clean, tidy, and tokenize text data to understand the various sentiments that tweets convey and create data visualizations to gain a better understanding of how common words and phrases are interpreted. 

       The digital marketing category of the CCIDM Virtual Workshops features popular topics that are important for digital marketers. For example, Griffin presents a workshop titled, An Introduction to Web Design and Development, where he covers the fundamental knowledge he gained from his position as the Website Design and Analytic Specialist. This includes web design, content management systems, and various tools that aid in web development. Another virtual workshop featured in the digital marketing category is presented by the former Web Analytics and Text Mining Specialist, Sarah Borsaly. In Borsaly’s workshop titled Website Google Analytics for Generating Customer Insights for Digital Marketing, she takes a deep dive into Google Analytics and how it can be used to find insights from a website, providing marketers with data that can aid in better decision-making. Both Griffin and Borsaly have since graduated from Cal Poly Pomona and now hold positions at Robert D. Niehaus and Amazon respectively. The Center’s Customer Relationship Management Specialist Andrea Escobar-Vara also presented a thorough Introduction to Email Marketing workshop which focuses on what email marketing entails and how to develop an effective email marketing campaign. In addition, Escobar-Vara covers the process an email has to go through before it reaches your inbox and how best to retain and engage your email recipients.

       In addition to the CCIDM Virtual Workshops, the Center YouTube channel also houses recordings of past Center events like the CCIDM Expert Speaker Series and the CCIDM Research Seminar Series. Most recently, Vice President of Digital Marketing and eCommerce at Viking Cruises Erantzeri Corona spoke on how data analytics is being used in marketing campaigns in his presentation titled Digital Transformation: Myth vs. Reality. AMI also hosted an event in collaboration with the Southern California Chapter of the Insights Association, which can also be found on the Center’s YouTube channel. This event featured a panel of undergraduate students and young professionals currently employed at Lieberman Research Worldwide. They discussed common roadblocks and significant experiences that contributed to their success in college and the beginning of their careers.

       The CCIDM Virtual Workshop Series has allowed Center members to showcase their knowledge of digital marketing and analytics topics as well as provide students, faculty, and professionals with accessible learning resources that they can access at any time. 

Subscribe to the Center’s Youtube channel to stay updated on new and exciting workshops coming soon!