Updating the marketing curriculum: developing a postgraduate customer experience course using authentic assessment

Despite the importance of customer experience (CX) to marketing practitioners, to customers, and in the academic literature, there are scant papers published regarding the teaching of CX. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap by providing an approach for teaching an advanced CX course, including the use of authentic assessment to develop practitioner-level skills in students, in a postgraduate context. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated using preliminary data from a survey to measure perceived learning, the median grade to measure actual learning, and formal student feedback scores to measure overall satisfaction. These initial findings indicate the approach is effective in terms of overall student satisfaction, achievement of the learning outcomes, and preparing students for the workplace through the development of practical skills. The paper provides support for prior research which reports on the benefits of authentic assessment. Finally, this paper makes suggestions for how CX could be taught, using a similar approach, to undergraduate students and to larger classes.