Teaching

“I teach, research, and practice innovation, entrepreneurship, and design.” (Karl Ulrich, Endowed Professor at the Wharton School)

I consider myself a theory-savvy modeler in Marketing, driven by a desire to contribute through high-quality research, yet who is also comfortable in lecture halls and classrooms. I earned my Doctorate in Business Administration, equivalent to a PhD in Marketing, at Koç University in Istanbul, and gained necessary skills and experience for teaching at TED University in Ankara. Innovation, strategic brand management, new product development and pricing are my main research areas. Figure 1 illustrates how I approach to research, scholarship and teaching services. They work together for knowledge generation and sharing.

Teaching

Quality of education can be measured through progress in critical thinking and freedom of expression. Teaching is then not a simple transfer of knowledge, yet motivating an interest, providing essentials to build knowledge on, and offer a perspective. With that, I am passionate to improve the education experience of learners in my courses. Learning begins and ends with respect, within a positive learning environment within the course, and through integrating sustainable development goals into course content and assessments. One example is emphasizing the design for environment principles the in my new product development courses.

My teaching approach is science and evidence based, connected to research and scholarship at its core. In doing so, I aim at incorporating digital technologies to strengthen engagement with learners and encourage use of technology. I consider myself as an active learning enthusiast. Opportunities to contribute to growth of learners and inspire ethical leadership are exciting. I believe, respect, accountability and transparency are three key principles. Integrating contemporary topics and research findings then improve the quality of weekly sessions/ lectures. I am the project-owner for the Vertically Integrated Project course #1 in Turkiye at TED University in 2024 Spring, offered as part of an initiative for Innovation Capacity Building for Higher Education, funded by the European Union.

I started teaching at TED University in 2017. Although I accepted the offer for an Assistant Professor position, that became a reality 5 years and some great teaching experience through Part-time Lecturer and Lecturer roles at TED University.* I delivered Social Media Marketing (BA465), Brand Management (BA464), and New Product Development (BA462), for the first time. Due to the request of the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, I developed Digital Marketing for Education Institutions (MEI505), and delivered to a class of professional educators in the Management in Educational Institutions Master of Arts program. Other courses I delivered includes mandatory on courses Production and Operations Management (BA305), Research Methods (BA401, ECON401, PSIR401) and Principles of Marketing (BA301). In addition to these courses, I supervised fifteen graduation projects in Business Administration (BA402) and one in Economics (ECON402). At TED University, overall, I have delivered 10 courses, reaching more than 1,000 learners. In anonymous course evaluation surveys, my average rating is about 4.5 out of 5.0. Notably, in MEI505, the rating was 4.89 out of 5.00 by professional educators, including teachers with over thirty years of experience. I find these as consistent indicators of satisfaction with learning experiences.

I joined Koç University in 2024 as a research oriented Lecturer to teach courses on Innovation Management, Marketing Research and marketing module of the Capstone Project in the Fall semester and Strategic Brand Management instead of Innovation Management in the Spring semester. My courses attracted great interest and I would be glad if these courses deliver long-term utility to learners.

I highly appreciate the role of universities for societies in providing a robust venue for learning for university students and professors alike. I collaborate with Nazli Wasti Pamuksuz (Professor of Management) and Ozlem Atay Ozkanlı (Professor of Management), on a teaching case about cooperatives, product development and branding, that will be available in 2025. I developed learning.love as an instrument to deliver recorded videos during the pandemic in a more private and effective way, and then to use for interaction in the post-pandemic period. I pilot tested Coursera integration in one of my courses at TEDU and also offered the first Vertically Integrated Projects in Turkiye, which is also one of the earliest in Europe. I find these, together with systematically encouraging comments I got from learners in my courses as an indication of some success in developing the future.


*”[A]mong college professors, there is a saying, ‘A handshake is good enough between businessmen. But when your university’s dean promises you something, get it in writing'” (Dixit and Nalebuff, 1993, p.151)

Dixit, Avinash K., and Barry J. Nalebuff. Thinking strategically: The competitive edge in business, politics, and everyday life. WW Norton & Company, 1993.

Here’s an Illustration of Bloom’s Taxonomy that I made. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, free to share, reproduce and use it, as long as you attribute it to the learners.love.