Course Plan

Prevailing conditions

Time planning

The course is planned for a one week full-time course with a preceding online phase (blended mobility) for students to get to know each other and share business ideas. However, the course can also be used in other course settings, e.g. two lessons weekly etc. If students can access and administrate the shops from home this makes the course concept even more flexible.

Technical setup

The technical setup for this course is that you will need a pre-installed instance of the Prestashop shop-software on a web server (see chapter 1 for more details and a comparison of different shop software).

The shops were filled with product data of typical regional delicatessen from South Tyrol. However, the data quality was deliberately at a very low level. The product descriptions were too short and did not make use of typical keywords. The meta tags on the product pages were not filled. In general the shops were only poorly optimised for search engines. In reality these shops would fail to achieve good search index listings with search engines thus harming the commercial success of the shops.

The students were now faced with a question-based task in which they had to define certain fundamental technical terms related to SEO, e.g. customer journey On- and OffPage optimisation etc. They also needed to find tools for page optimisation, keyword analysis and snippet optimisation (see course materials).

After this more theoretical input, students needed to optimise their shop according to their findings. This involved the development of an action plan before actually implementing the changes in their shop.

In the last step students needed to prepare a presentation on their findings and their practical implementation in their shop.

Actual Course Plan

1. Self-Assessment: Students fill in the self-assessment sheet in order to evaluate their competences and skills (ideally as an online questionnaire)

2. Work Phase: In a self-organized setting students optimize an existing online shop and create product photography. During the work phase they will have regular meetings with teachers in which they will have to show the progress they made and during which they can also discuss technical, social or organisational issues.

3. Presentation Phase: At the end of the work phase the students will have to present the optimizations of their shop and the product photography they created in front of the teachers and other students.

4. Evaluation Phase: At the end the outcome of the project will be evaluated. Once again students will have to self-assess their competences. Also teachers will asses the competences of the students. In a short oral feedback both assessments will be compared and discussed. Students can be marked based on the competence sheet.