MKTR @ ISB, Term 6 in Mohali.

Update:
Might as well clear some confusion. The Homeworks and the end-term will each be 40% of the total grade each. CP will be 12%. I'd initially put CP at 22% but later realized that for a non-case based course like MKTR, having such a large CP component that could by itself swing letter grades, might not be wise.
Now, I hear ASA is saying I can't change the grading criteria set in session 1 and cannot use a course project even if students may want it later on. Well, I've asked for clarifications from ASA, let's see.

Sudhir

Hi Class of 2013 at Mohali,

The MKTR course starts today. Welcome to the informal course blog.

There have been a lot of changes, revamps, streamlining, additions etc based on feedback, hindsight and some foresight this year.

I've taken up MEXL as one of the main software platforms for MKTR this year based on popular preference. The other platform MKTR will use is R.

I don't want anyone to feel iffy about the use of R. In SPSS or MEXL you use a menu-driven process to execute analysis. I have endeavored to make R as close to menu-driven in ease of use as possible. Most assignments and MKTR tools on R have ready code associated with them. I will publish the code needed to solve any assignment I give on this blog. All you need to do is essentially copy-paste my R code to run the same analysis. Pls see this blog-post as an example.
Bottomline: The course is not about you "learning" to code on R but to use ready-made code to get R to do what you want.

One reason why R is on this course is that it allows me to to introduce a wide range of new research methods that are only now coming into the mainstream and which will take a long while before they make their way into commercial software packages. Things like text mining (see this blog-post for what we did in term 5), Twitter stream extraction and analysis (see this blog-post) etc. are just a few copy-pastes of R code away on R. Good luck with trying those things on MEXL, JMP or SPSS.

Actively seeking student feedback has helped me course-correct in the past-term. I intend to continue this practice.

More later today when we meet in class.

Sudhir