The subject of the diploma thesis is the process of online persuasion in the case of higher education applicants for bachelor's and master's programmes at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (FSV UK) subject to tuition fees. The selected programmes form a specific class within the set of study programmes offered by the faculty resulting in necessity of different promotion strategies. The specificity of these programmes lies in the primary focus on multidisciplinarity, specific target group and the requirement of tuition fee payment. Online marketing and the recipient's persuasion being an effective tool gaining attention rapidly in recent years is the focus of this thesis. The attitudes of the main actors involved in the online persuasion in case of FSV UK are analyzed employing both quantitative (a questionnaire survey) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews with applicants and students) approaches. A SWOT analysis is performed based on a theoretical framework of information from universities, university marketing, marketing mix of universities and the persuasive principles and tools used to persuade the applicants to apply for studies at FSV UK. The work concludes with a summary of results obtained in a proposal of marketing strategy optimization for the Department of Public...

Service-learning, with a longstanding history in American higher education (Burkhardt & Pasque, 2005), includes three key tenets: superior academic learning, meaningful and relevant community service, and persistent civic learning (McGoldrick and Ziegert, 2002). The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has created an elective classification system – Carnegie Community Engagement Classification – for institutions of higher education to demonstrate the breadth and depth of student involvement and learning through partnerships and engagement in the community (Dalton & Crosby, 2011; Hurtado & DeAngelo, 2012; Kuh et al., 2008; Pryor, Hurtado, Saenz, Santos, & Korn, 2007). Community engagement "is in the culture, commonly understood practices and knowledge, and (CCEC helps determine) whether it is really happening – rhetoric versus reality" (J. Saltmarsh, personal communication, August 11, 2014). The study considers the applications of three Carnegie Community Engagement Classification designated institutions to understand the institutionalization of service-learning over time by examining the 2008 designation and 2015 reclassification across institution types – a Private Liberal Arts College, a Private Teaching University, and a Public Research University located in the same metropolitan area. Organizational Change Theory was used as a theoretical model. Case study methodology was used in the present qualitative research to perform document analysis with qualitative interviews conducted to elucidate the data from the 2008 and 2015 CCEC applications from the three institutions. Using intra- and inter-comparative analysis, this study highlights approaches, policies, ethos, and emerging concepts to inform how higher education institutions increase the quality and quantity of service-learning opportunities that benefit higher education practitioners as well as community leaders.