This Course Brought to You By…

Here’s an interesting story about a university course with some pretty blatant corporate ties:

[The] IACC [International Anticounterfeiting Coalition] sponsor[ed] a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real.

I can almost understand how this might have seemed like a good lesson for the students of a course to learn a new marketing tactic, but it’s a bit fishy that they 1) received $10,000 from the organization, and 2) received materials to teach from. As an instructor, this is perhaps the most egregious thing–that the classroom became a pulpit for the IACC to present their view to paying students. It doesn’t sound as though critically engaging the issue of counterfeiting (or guerrilla marketing) was a part of the course at all.