MKT 685: Course Introduction

DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING
MKT 685: BUSINESS GEOGRAPHICS

Course Introduction

Welcome to MKT 685: Business Geographics for Managers. This page provides general information about the course to help you decide if you should enroll.

This is not a lecture course. Even the text book topics will be covered primarily by independent learning followed by class discussion, both direct and electronic. In every lesson and exercise, you will engage in specific learning activities and share the results with classmates. You will be assigned to teams with responsibility for formulating team responses to text and exercise questions and posting those to the course discussion list. You will devise electronic communication systems to organize your team's internal interaction and external postings to class. I will be available physically (in the lab and in my office) and via Email at all times, to help with questions you have or difficulties you encounter.

This course is designed to improve students’ skills in using geographic information system (GIS) technologies in the business decision making. This field is called Business Geographics (BG). In this course, you will use ArcView GIS 3.1 and 3.2 software to analyze business data. The course has three components: 1) an introductory ArcView course from ESRI's Virtual Campus, 2) a series of readings from your textbook and other sources, and 3) a series of class and individual BG projects. You will find the sequence and detailed instructions for the last two components in the course schedule and linked pages. The purpose of this page is to get you started with the Virtual Campus course which will comprise the first third of the semester.

Getting Started in ESRI's Virtual Campus Course

Your first task should be to familiarize yourself with ESRI's Virtual Campus. Navigate the site until you become comfortable with its structure and major features. Be sure to review the Course Catalog for the complete list of courses available. Many of these courses have free introductory modules available to let you sample the course content. You should also review the Search Page which provides access to GIS-related articles. You can also find a description of our course on the Virtual Campus site.
Purchase the Introduction to ArcView GIS course. BE SURE TO OBTAIN THE 40% UNIVERSITY DISCOUNT IN THE ORDER PROCESS. TO DO SO, YOU MUST USE YOUR @MURRAYSTATE.EDU EMAIL ADDRESS. THE DISCOUNT WILL BE CALCULATED AUTOMATICALLY.
Upon completion of the purchase process, you will be Emailed a registration code which you will use to access the course Introduction to ArcView GIS course.
Upon registration, you will be eligible to download the Virtual Campus edition of the ArcView GIS 3.1 (look for the Download link) software. This will allow you to work on course assignments from your computer. You will also use it for the BG projects in the third component of the course.

We will begin work on the Virtual Campus course on 18 January and proceed at the pace of one module per week. Successful completion of this course is one of the requirements for MKT 685, so be sure to start on time and keep up with the scheduled modules.

A final note, though we will not have a formal exercise in any of the tools of the MS Office Suite, we will be interfacing with various applications in this Suite as part of our class exercises. If you need to review any of these tools, you may use the interactive tutorials provided by Academic Computing and Technology Services (ACTS) to do so. Contact ACTS at ACTS@MurrayState.edu for information on gaining access to the tutorials. The system requires a browser plugin, which you will be prompted to download.