If Zoom fatigue is lowering enthusiasm for you and your students, here are some tips on using one simple tool – Slido – to inject energy into your online classes and increase online engagement.
Encourage Anonymous Questions
Slido is best known for helping instructors solicit questions from students and providing a mechanism for students to prioritize their most important questions.
A lesser-known element of Slido is that it allows your students to ask questions anonymously, and…
Anonymous questions increase interaction.
For example, if your high school health classes were anything like mine, the most interesting questions came when students anonymously wrote questions on pieces of paper and put them in a box to be answered by the teacher at the end of the week. Those questions started such provocative discussions I remember several of them today…decades later.
When you enable students to ask questions anonymously in your class, several interesting things happen:
Introverts participate. If you have a few vocal students asking questions and little participation from others, anonymous questions lower student anxiety, which makes it easier for everyone to participate.
You learn what students are thinking about. Anonymity provides cover for students to ask questions they may be too afraid to ask but are curious about.
Discussions start. Anonymity means you can invite students to pose “challenging” questions. If you encourage your students to question what they’re learning, why it’s important, or why they should have to do the work you’re assigning, you spark discussions about how entrepreneurship is relevant, which can often be the key to increasing engagement.
One great way to take advantage of this technique is to start each class session off by inviting students to post anonymous questions about the last lesson you did, their last homework assignment, or anything else on their mind. If you do this at the beginning of every lesson, students know there’s always a safe place for them to ask questions, and you’ll see more of them crop up throughout your term.
Crystalize Learnings
In addition to soliciting questions, Slido also solicits brainstormed ideas from students.
One interesting way to use this technique is to have students post their takeaways from a lesson or exercise.
Some takeaways from the 2020 TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Summer Virtual Conference
When you ask students to write down what they’ve learned from an exercise, the process of writing their takeaway helps cement their learning. Plus, when you ask other students to upvote other students’ takeaways, they get to see a summary of all the topics you covered during the lesson, you also get to see which were most salient (and what topics you may need to reinforce in another class).
Plus, it’s a fun interactive way to end a lesson. Speaking of fun interactions, Slido is also great for creating…
Quiz Games
As we wrote in the Gamify your Lectures post, Slido is also great for replacing boring slides, with interactive games.
Be sure to read our full write-up for details on easy ways to make presenting information more fun for students.
See it All in Action
Enter your email address below to see exactly how we use Slido with these techniques to teach our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Online Virtual Conference attendees:
https://youtu.be/remG5jCjm9Y?t=4m53s
Summary
If you want to inject a little energy into your class, we’ve found one simple tool – Slido – enables you to:
Solicit anonymous, prioritized questions from your students
Brainstorm ideas with students, including their takeaways
Slide-based lectures are a surefire way to disengage your students – especially in online classes.
One of the easiest ways to keep students engaged is to replace your slides with a quiz game like Slido or Kahoot!.
For example, let’s say you’re teaching a lesson on finance and you want to define a number of different concepts:
Profit vs Revenue
Cashflow
Customer Acquisition Cost
Etc.
The most boring way to present this will be to talk through a set of slides with definitions on them, like so:
Bullets are boring.
A more engaging way to teach is to replace your slides with a no-stakes pre-quiz where students get to test their knowledge of concepts before you present them. That ends up looking something like:
Lectures can be fun!
How to Gamify Lectures
For every concept you want to cover in class, create a quiz question that asks your students something about that concept. For example, you might ask:
“What is the difference between gross profit and net profit?”
A) Gross profit refers to physical goods (e.g. groceries) and net profit refers to virtual goods (e.g. internet “net” goods).
B) Gross profit is how much money made in total. Net profit is how much money made after expenses.
C) Gross profit is how much money made minus the cost of goods sold. Net profit is how much money made after all expenses and taxes.
D) Net profit is how much money made in total. Gross profit is how much money made after expenses.
Instead of asking your students to complete all of the quiz questions at once, you’ll show them the first quiz question before you’ve given them the answer. By asking your students a question about a topic before you’ve spoken about it, you’re inviting them to actively engage and test their knowledge on the subject.
After your students answer the first question, you’ll be able to see which students got it correct and the students who answered the question most quickly, will show up on your quiz’s “Leaderboard.”
Now that you know who mostly quickly answered the question correctly (they’ll be #1 on your leaderboard), you can ask that student to explain to everyone else why their answer was correct.
You reinforce what your student says and round out any points they missed.
Repeat this process for the remaining questions and you’ll have converted your lecture into an interactive game.
See it in Action
Enter your email address below to see exactly how we use this technique to teach our Engaging Students Online Virtual Conference attendees:
Benefits of this Approach
Activates your passive students. Instead of half-listening to you talk through bullets, this interactive quiz format invites students to actively test their knowledge of a subject. Game mechanics like points, a leaderboard, and a timer all help students focus their attention on the material you’re presenting by asking them to do more work than a typical lecture, not less.
Students teach each other. Because you’re asking students to explain to one another why an answer is correct, they’ll do the majority of talking and be able to speak in a way that is more engaging to other students.
Wrong answers inspire learning. Students, like all of us, learn more from mistakes than successes, so inviting them to take their best guess at answering a question before you’ve given them the definite answer creates an opportunity for them to learn either way:
If they get the question right, they’ll confirm some information they already knew.
If they get the question wrong, they’ll be primed and ready to learn the correct answer.
Discover what your students already know / what they need help with. These quizzes are, at their core, formative assessment tools. When the majority of your class gets a question correct, that means they know that concept well and you can devote more time to covering concepts your students don’t know well (i.e. more of their answers were incorrect).
Tips
Use tools like Slido (our favorite) or Kahoot! (another great option).
Make the questions hard, but not impossible. If the questions are too easy, students will get bored. If they’re impossible, they’ll start randomly guessing. If however, the questions are hard by doable, you’ll take advantage of the fact that students learn more when they get questions wrong, while keeping questions within the zone of proximal development.
Don’t overdo it. This is a great technique, but if you do it every class it’s benefits will wear off. Instead, mix this approach up with a number of experiential exercises (like those in the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum).
How-To Videos
Finally, here are a couple of quick tutorial videos that demonstrate how to use Slido quizzes:
Summary
If your students aren’t as engaged as you think they could be, give this technique a shot. It’s worked wonders for us, and we’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
Want to improve how you teach entrepreneurship? Steve has some ideas.
Before we get there though, with the fires raging along the West Coast of the US, one of which is stunningly close to Steve’s home, we wanted to send him, his family, and everyone affected by the fires, our best wishes.
Steve and I sat down, pre-pandemic, for an in-depth discussion on the state of entrepreneurship education and ways to improve it going forward.
Below I’ve written up a summary of half of our conversation: thoughts on how to teach entrepreneurship.
In an upcoming part two, I’ll summarize some of Steve’s ideas on creating a comprehensive entrepreneurship curriculum, including:
The skills professors should teach their students, and
Four courses Steve thinks are core to a robust entrepreneurship program
First, for anyone unfamiliar: Who is Steve Blank?
Forefather of Lean Startup
Entrepreneur, author, professor, an originator of evidence-based entrepreneurship, Steve Blank has developed or made famous some of the most recognizable approaches to entrepreneurship including:
In addition, Steve has reimagined the way entrepreneurship is taught throughout the world with his Lean LaunchPad, NSF I-Corps, and Hacking for X (e.g. Recovery, Defense, Diplomacy, Impact, Energy, etc.) programs.
In short, Steve has dramatically improved the way we practice and teach entrepreneurship.
Why Teaching Entrepreneurship is Hard
One of the very first topics that came up during our conversation was how we all can become more effective instructors.
Roughly 75% of college faculty are adjunct or non-tenure-track professors. Steve shared that as a practitioner, one of the challenges he faced was not what to teach, but how to teach:
”There is usually very little onboarding in place to train professors in the most effective way to teach entrepreneurial lessons.”
While most of us are successful entrepreneurs or successful professors, very few of us are equally great at both.
Compounding the problem, Steve mentioned that there are so many kinds of entrepreneurship – small business, high tech, corporate, social, family business, etc.
With these challenges in mind, I asked Steve for recommendations to overcome them.
Steve’s Teaching Tips
Tip #1: Accept You Don’t Know Everything
“I see my mentors and other adjuncts and coaches make this mistake, in thinking your domain expertise is the expertise of entrepreneurship rather than a very narrow slice.”
When Steve first began teaching at UC Berkeley, he was paired with professor John Freeman who recommended he sit in on other instructors’ entrepreneurship courses. Steve mentioned, “the shock to my system, the discovery…there are different types of entrepreneurship.”
Steve was a successful entrepreneur, but he wasn’t a successful small business, high tech, corporate, social, and lifestyle entrepreneur.
Each type of entrepreneurship has different goals and to be taught most effectively, requires a different approach and expertise. To illustrate his point, Steve mentioned that in high tech entrepreneurship, the first goal is to have a seed round that raises millions of dollars. In small business entrepreneurship, however, the first goal may be to make enough to fund a lifestyle and family.
It’s this diversity in objectives that can make effectively teaching innovation difficult and it was his realization that he didn’t know everything about every type of entrepreneurship that led Steve to increase his breadth of knowledge.
Tip #2: Get a Mentor
Luckily, Berkely had a semi-formal onboarding process in place which sped up the learning process for new faculty. For other educators who do not have access to that kind of program, Steve recommends:
Attending other entrepreneurship instructor’s classes
If you’re an entrepreneur first, get another educator to mentor you
If you’re an academic first, pair with an entrepreneur to teach
Like we teach our students, teams with aligned goals and diverse skills have better outcomes; the same applies to our teaching. To improve your classes, find people who have a different set of skills and experiences than you and collaborate with them.
When in Doubt: Experiences Teach Skills
“If you’ve never started a company and you’re teaching entrepreneurship, it’s like teaching a med school class and never having cracked a chest.”
Entrepreneurship is a combination of theory and practice and our students learn it best when they are offered by perspectives.
Steve further explained his point by saying, “Startups are essentially years of chaos, uncertainty, and terror. That’s not what a typical academic career is like. And so it’s kind of hard to teach tenacity, resilience, and agility and maybe curiosity, which are the key skills for early-stage entrepreneurs without having lived with that uncertainty.”
Students Learn Best By Doing
How do we teach customer empathy, customer development, and customer discovery effectively?
The answer is learning by doing. When Steve teaches his Lean LaunchPad classes, he insists his students talk to 10 customers each week. And he always follows up to ensure they actually made contact.
For an engaging way to help your students understand exactly what questions they should and shouldn’t ask customers, you can also use our free experiential Customer Interviewing Cards lesson plan.
The same goes for every topic in entrepreneurship:
Idea generation
Solution ideation
Finance
Pitching
Every entrepreneurship skill must be practiced to be internalized.
The Future of Entrepreneurship Education
Key skills for early-stage entrepreneurs can be taught with the right combination of theory and experiential exercises.
In class, Steve looks to create a feeling that there is no “right” answer that can be found in a book. It is this approach that encourages students to figure things out for themselves and inspires outside-the-box thinking. The Lean LaunchPad methodology Steve created is great for stimulating the chaos of entrepreneurship. It is this chaos that identifies those students ready for the pursuit of entrepreneurship.
Steve conceptualizes his classes as the Juilliard of entrepreneurship; when the way to train artists was with an experiential, hands-on apprenticeship. With this in mind, Steve thinks successful entrepreneurship curricula should include entrepreneurial appreciation.
“These core [entrepreneurship] courses will be the new liberal arts courses of the 21st century.”
Takeaways
Here are my takeaways from the first part of our conversation:
Get a mentor. If your background is in academia, find an entrepreneur to mentor you in real-world realities. If you’re an entrepreneur, find an academic mentor who can teach you about teaching. Teaching entrepreneurship requires both.
Train entrepreneurs like artists. Just like are no “right” answers in art, there are no right answers in entrepreneurship. Instead of focusing on teaching answers, we should focus on teaching skills.
Students learn skills by practicing them. Experiences, not textbooks, are the best way to teach skills.
Don’t Miss Part 2
Subscribe here to get notified of the second part of my interview with Steve where we discuss:
The necessary skills professors should teach their students, and
Four courses he thinks are essential to a robust entrepreneurship program
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviews, and the right questions to ask.
Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus. This online entrepreneurship syllabus is an innovative online experience that is asynchronous with multiple touchpoints, skills-based, and experiential.
Whether you’re teaching online, face-to-face, or a hybrid of the two, we built our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) to provide award-winning engagement and excitement for your students
We’ve taken the guesswork out of creating an engaging approach that works both online or in-person. ExEC has a comprehensive entrepreneurship syllabus template complete with 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans that can be easily adapted to your needs.
With Fall fast approaching, this 3-part “Checklist” newsletter series will help you prep for what will likely be an uncertain semester.
The first thing you need to do for Fall, no matter what your administration is saying, is…
Fully commit to teaching online.
In-Person will be Worse than Online
In normal circumstances, in-person classes are unquestionably better learning environments for most students. This Fall, however, the experience won’t be normal:
You and your students will all be wearing face masks for the duration of your classes.
Your students won’t be able to interact with one another. Separated by 6 feet, student-to-student interactions will need to be eliminated, and you’ll be asked to restrict your movement within the classroom.
We’re about to enter cold & flu season when anyone, including you, with even a hint of any symptom – sniffles, sneezes, sore throat, etc. – will be asked to stay home. Combine those students with those that are simply uncomfortable attending class and your “in-person” class will quickly turn into a Frankenstein’s monster of half-online / half-in-person classes that’s the worst of both worlds.
These restrictions mean that your normally interactive entrepreneurship classes will be reduced to a series of lectures. This is not only boring for you and your students, but worse than that…
Neglecting the reasons our classes exist in the first place: to teach entrepreneurship skills.
Fortunately, the ineffectiveness of in-person classes won’t last long this Fall because…
It’s not if you go online. It’s when.
When you consider:
It’s summer now, school is out, and COVID is still spreading rapidly.
Come Fall, when students travel from across the country and start socializing on campus, in the dorms, and at inevitable parties, cases will spike at schools.
As soon as any of your in-person students test positive, you’ll be asked to immediately transition online because you or your other students could already be infected.
Unfortunately, if you’re in the US…
It’s inevitable your classes will move online.
Fortunately, there’s some good news:
Online Classes Can Be Better than In-Person
The online experience your students had last year wasn’t great because you weren’t given adequate time to prepare. Of course, as we collectively demonstrated during the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Virtual Conference, with a little preparation…
Online learning can be just as good (better?) than in-person.
When you teach online, whether synchronously or asynchronously, with proper planning you can replicate virtually all of the experiences you’d do in-person.
Key to Success: Start Prepping Now
As we’ve seen instructors embrace the fact that classes are going online in Fall, we’ve seen them simultaneously learn new tools while…
Dramatically simplifying their prep process.
And with the right tools, it turns out, there’s not an overwhelming amount of prep to do.
Step #1: Ask to Teach Completely Online
If you haven’t already, have a conversation with your department chair or dean about why online classes from day 1 will be better for your students than “hybrid” (half in-person / half online) classes that inevitably transition online. Try to communicate that, in addition to being a more safe, less stressful experience for you and your students…
Committing to online teaching now, will enable you to focus your prep and provide a higher quality experience for students.
More important than whether they take classes in-person or online, students want a motivating, engaging learning experience. The best way to provide that is to commit to one class format now, and start prepping for it.
Step #2: Prep Your Online Lessons
To avoid the suboptimal experience students had last Spring, it’s important to start prepping for online lessons now. To do that you can either:
Start translating your in-person activities to be “Zoom-able” or
Use a curriculum like ExEC that has already been translated online.
Using a structured set of lessons like the ones in ExEC enables you to have modular exercises you can integrate into your course to ensure your class is engaging whether its in-person, online, or hybrid.
Plus ExEC has full support to instantly create courses for you on:
No matter what tools you use to teach this Fall, the most important thing to do is start prepping now.
If you’re able to see the writing on the wall now and prepare to teach online, you’ll not only make your life easier, you’ll create a much more valuable and engaging experience for your students.
Next Week: Sample Online Syllabi
To help with your prep, we want to provide detailed synchronous and asynchronous online syllabi you can use to adapt your schedule.
Stay tuned for that! In the meantime, stay safe, and let us know how we can help you prep!
Create Digital Worksheets with Google Docs and Slides
See the instructions below to learn how to use Google Docs and Slides to create your own digital worksheets that will engage students.
How to Create Digital Worksheets
In case you missed our previous post in this series, we talked about how combine your slides and webcam to recreate the effect below for live sessions.
We’ve fast-tracked the development of new online-ready exercises which you can use individually or as a set, called the ExEC Online: Express pack, available free through June!
Our final lesson, 60 Minute MVP, is ready!
Based on the extremely popular in-person version of this exercise, the online version of the 60 Minute MVP will have your students designing experiments to test demand just like they would if they weren’t under lockdown. They will:
Create a landing page
Add an explainer video and then
Start accepting pre-orders
The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. With that in mind, this exercise will show your students how to quickly reduce the uncertainty of their business model by helping them launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services.
Almost more important though…
This exercise is a ton of fun!
Students are excited because they’re doing something they didn’t know they had the skills to do, and it’s a great time for you because students are engaged in creating and sharing something with you and the rest of the class.
The ExEC Online: Express Pack is a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class individually or as a set.
In addition to the 60 Minute MVP lesson plan, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging, but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:
Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that is particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
Financial Projection Simulator: With a global recession looming, it’s essential our students understand the elements of a robust financial model, and how to develop a sustainable one. This exercise makes finance approachable by turning what would normally be an overwhelming series of numbers, into a game-like experience that enables students to experiment with many different financial models.
How to Interview Customers on Lockdown: Now that business model assumptions have been flipped on their head, it’s more critical than ever that students learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover what problems they’re facing. A person with the skills to learn about how this new world will effect people individually, is a person that will thrive during this, and any future dramatic changes. This lesson will help students understand how to find customers to talk to, what questions to ask, and most importantly, why asking them will form the basis of a successful business model.
If you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please click here.
Due to the accelerated pace at which we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration of the ExEC Online: Express Pack is designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.
Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!
Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)
Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?
If you know anyone who these new lessons might help, please invite them to participate! You can:
Thank you for all the work you’re doing teaching and supporting young people during this challenging time – we’re grateful to have an opportunity to support you, and look forward to helping you however we can!
If you’re wondering whether your students are paying attention during your online lectures…they’re not.
“I’m waking up and then falling asleep again in Zoom classes.” – Xavier University Student
To be clear, this isn’t your fault or your students’ fault. The way screen sharing works on video conference platforms (where students see your slides fullscreen but only a tiny thumbnail of your webcam) means it’s near impossible for anyone to pay attention during a slide-based online lecture.
You can recreate this effect for your live (and recorded) lectures.
But you can easily change that. Using free, open source software, you can do what news and TV shows have done for decades:
Show facts and faces side-by-side.
When students can see your face, they can read your non-verbal cues to see how passionate you are and how important a subject is. Combine that with the fact that human faces are naturally engaging, and you can start lecturing online in a way that’s not only more interesting to your students, but more fun for you – at least it has been for me :).
For everything you need to combine your slides and webcam, open the free instructions below.
How to Combine your Slides and Webcam
We will show you, step-by-step, how to combine your slides with your webcam to create engaging experiences for your students when listening to your lectures online.
Step 1: Create Test Slides
Create slides that have a green screen built into them, which means you will add an area (your green screen) that you will eventually replace with a video output (your webcam). To do this, in PowerPoint:
Click “Insert” on the top menu
Click the “Shapes” option
Select the square shape option.
Draw a square box over half of a blank slide. Then fill that box with a bright green color, using RGB color codes 0 for Red, 255 for Green, and 0 for Blue. You then want to send your green screen to the back by right-clicking, and selecting “Save to Back” from the menu that pops up. Finally, move the text box on the slide to the other half of the slide so it does not overlap with the green screen half.
Keep the PowerPoint window open and move it to the left half of your screen.
Now download OBS Studio, which is free, open-source software that will enable the green screen effect. You’ll first want to set up your video output in OBS. To do this
Click on “File” in the top left corner
Click on “Settings” in that File menu
Click on “Video” in the menu on the left
In the top box labeled “Base (Canvas) Resolution”, make sure it is “1920 x 1080”
Now you want to add a new video source. In the “Sources” box at the bottom:
Click the + button
Click “Video capture device” from the menu that pops up
Name the device in the top line of the box that pops up (“Webcam” for instance)
Click “OK”
In the next pop-up box, select your webcam in the “Device” box
In the “Resolution/FPS Type” box, if your webcam allows output at different resolutions, you will want to select the same resolution you selected in the OBS video output (in this case, “1920 x 1080”)
Click “OK” and you should see your webcam output with a red box around it in the OBS window.
Next, you want to add a specific window to your OBS video output as a source. In this case, that window will be your PowerPoint slides. To do this, in PowerPoint:
Click on the “Slide Show” menu at the top
Click on the “Set Up Slide Show” menu
Click on the “Browsed by an individual (window)” radio button
Click “OK”
Start your slideshow
Next, you want to tell OBS to put the window showing your PowerPoint slide on top of the output from your webcam. To do this, in the Sources box of the OBS window:
Click the + button
Click “Window capture” from the drop-down menu
Name the output (maybe “Slides”)
Click “OK”
OBS will provide you with a set of windows you can potentially capture and lay over the webcam output. Click the drop-down menu labeled “Window” and select “PowerPoint Slideshow Presentation”
Click “OK”
You will now see the slideshow on top of your webcam output, with a red box around it. Drag the edges of the red box to make the slide show window the entire OBS output. You can then resize the original slide show (on the left half of your screen) to get rid of any black bars or elements around the edges you don’t want visible.
The next step is to get rid of the green screen. To do this:
In the OBS window, in the Sources box, right-click on the “Slides” source (or whatever you named your slides file)
Click “Filters” from the drop-down menu
Click the + on the bottom left of that window that opens
Click on “Color Key” from the drop-down menu
Name the Color Key in the box that pops up (for example, “Greenscreen”)
Click “OK”
You will see that the green part of the slideshow screen has been eliminated. If you see a slight green line between the two halves of the slides showing in the OBS window, you can slide the “Similarlity” slide to the right until that disappears. Click “Close” and you should see the right half of your slides visible and your webcam visible on the left half of the OBS window.
The next step is to move the webcam window. Click and drag the webcam output to the left until your face is positioned in the left half of the OBS window.
Now you can advance the PowerPoint slides by clicking on the Powerpoint window, and advancing the slides as you normally would. What you will see is in the OBS window, on the right side, the slides are advancing while the webcam output stays in place.
One advanced step is to create an audio source in OBS. To do this:
Click the + button in the Sources box at the bottom.
Click the “Audio Input Capture” in the drop-down menu
This will be to capture your microphone, so name it accordingly (i.e., “Microphone”)
Click “OK”
In the pop-up window, select whatever microphone you normally use, then click “OK”
This isn’t necessary to capture the slide and webcam videos in OBS. However, you also have the capability to record videos in OBS. If you wanted to record any lectures/lessons in OBS, now you would have the capability to capture the screen and your audio – you would just click the “Start Recording” button in the Controls box in the OBS window.
Step 3: Send Video Output
You now have OBS set up to produce the output you want. The next step is to send that output to the places you want it sent. You have two basic options to make this happen.
Option 1: Virtual Camera
This option includes a piece of software that takes your OBS output and makes it look like it’s a normal webcam to any video conferencing software (Zoom, Webex, etc.) To enable this, all you need to do is select OBS as the video output (instead of your normal webcam) within your video conferencing software. This is the optimal solution, but it doesn’t always work seamlessly with every combination of operating system and video conferencing software. For instance, this works great for Windows and Zoom, but at the time of this post, Macs don’t support virtual cameras by default, so this isn’t the optimal solution for Macs.
Windows:
Install the VirtualCam plugin from here (click the “Go to download” link on the right side of the page).
When the install is finished, in OBS, click “Tools” at the top
Click “VirtualCam” from the drop-down menu
Click “Auto Start” in the box that pops up
Slide the “Buffered frames” slide all the way to the left so it is at 0
Click “Start”
Macs: You can follow the instructions in the following video to connect OBS to broadcast on Zoom on a Mac:
Go to https://ndi.tv/tools/, scroll to the bottom of the page, and download the NDI Tools for Mac. You’ll have to provide your name and email address, and then download and install both the tools and the driver. Install the Driver download first. Then download the Tools files – when you open that folder, you will see multiple files. You want to install the “NewTekNDIVirtualInput.pkg” and the “NewTekNDIVideoMonitor.pkg” files.
Click Tools on the top bar, then click NDI Output Settings in the drop-down menu, check the box next to Main Output, then click OK
Open the NDI Virtual Input program
You will see NDI on the top bar to the right of “Help”. Click on that NDI, it should list your computer name with (OBS) after it. Click on that in the drop-down menu
Open the NDI NewTek Video Monitor program
Click File in the top bar, then click your computer from the drop-down menu, then click NDI Virtual Input from that drop-down menu
Open Zoom
Click on Settings (should be a small gear in the upper right, or you may have to click on your profile picture in the upper right, and then click on Settings in the menu that opens)
Select Video in the menu on the left side of the Settings box
In the drop-down menu for “Camera”, select NDI Video option
Make sure the “Mirror my video” box is checked
Select Audio in the menu of the left side of the Settings box
In the drop-down menu for Microphone, select NDI Audio
Uncheck the box for “Automatically adjust microphone volume”
Open a Zoom meeting and your video should be NDI Video, and your audio should be NDI Audio
This has now enabled your virtual camera to send the output to any service that wants to use your camera. To check whether this is working, open your video conferencing software (i.e., Zoom, Webex). Start a new meeting.
If your video conferencing window overlaps with your PowerPoint window, it will show up in your OBS output window. To prevent this, drag or shrink your video conferencing window so it does not overlap with your PowerPoint window, so in your OBS output window, all you see is your webcam output (your face) and the non-greenscreen part of your slides.
We recommend you downsize the OBS window and enlarge the video conferencing window. But when doing this, make sure nothing overlaps with the PowerPoint window.
Click the appropriate buttons to start your video in your video conferencing window. The camera you want to select in your video conferencing software is the “OBS Camera”. You should see the OBS output is now showing in the video conferencing window.
Option 2: Screen Sharing OBS Preview Window
In the OBS output window, right-click in the grey section to the left of your face. Select “Windowed Projector Preview” from the drop-down menu. What this gives you is a window that previews the OBS output. You can adjust that window size to eliminate any sort of black bars or “blank” space around the edges.
In your video conferencing window, instead of using “OBS Camera” as your video output, you can select “Screen Share” (in Zoom) and select the “Windowed Projector Preview” screen. You will see a green box around the “Windowed Project Preview” box, which means that is what is being sent out via the video conferencing Screen Share.
Step 4: Add Some Flair to your Slides
Just as you do in class, you want your presentations to be dynamic and engaging for your students. You can do this by adding small elements to your presentation.
You might add your school colors to the presentation. Use larger, more interesting fonts. You can also experiment with moving the greenscreen portion around on your slides to shift where your webcam output shows up. Maybe you add that to the bottom corner of your slides, and you can look up at the text as it flies into your slides.
You now have the capability to create dynamic, engaging presentations for your students. Experiment with what OBS can do to bring your lectures and presentations to life!
If you haven’t already registered, remember to join us at the:
Last week we opened registration to a virtual conference dedicated to engaging students online. So far, 350+ entrepreneurship educators have registered. We hope you join us!
Let’s be honest. Teaching to a screen isn’t as fun as teaching in person. In person you can:
See if students are engaged
Have lively discussions
Connect with students
None of those are easy to do online, and because of it, teaching online can be more draining and less enjoyable.
Online Teaching Best Practices
Interested in learning how to teach online in a more engaging way? How about learning best practices in a live, “practice what we preach” environment with other entrepreneurship instructors from around the world?
Whether you’re new to online teaching and looking to improve your experience, or a pro willing to share your wisdom, please let us know if you’re interested in a virtual workshop dedicated to increasing engagement in online classes.
We’ve fast-tracked the development of new online-ready exercises which you can use individually or as a set, called the ExEC Online: Express pack, available free through June!
Based on our Customer Interviewing Cards, this exercise has been adapted to teach students how to interview customers under the unique circumstances that COVID-19 has presented. Hopefully, this lesson will only be applicable this term, but…
…it may be helpful in the Fall too!
This lesson is a fun way to teach your students:
Where to find customers to interview during a quarantine
We’ve made this exercise as easy to integrate as possible.
Interviewing Customers Step 1
Have your students watch this video:
If you’re teaching a synchronous class, feel free to skip showing the video and simply teach the principles yourself.
Step 2
Students complete the Digital Customer Interviewing Cards spreadsheet where they learn what their “objectives” (i.e. goals) for conducting customer interviews are, as well as the best and worst questions to ask during those interviews.
Here’s a quick look at what the spreadsheet looks like:
Step 3
Students get access to a robust interview script they can use for both remote, and in-person, problem discovery videos.
The ExEC Online: Express Pack is a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class individually or as a set.
In addition to the Customer Interview lesson plan, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:
Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that are particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
Financial Projection Simulator: With a global recession looming, it’s essential our students understand the elements of a robust financial model, and how to develop a sustainable one. This exercise makes finance approachable by turning what would normally be an overwhelming series of numbers, into a game-like experience that enables students to experiment with many different financial models.
60 Minute MVP: The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. This exercise will show your students how to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services. Plus, even outside the entrepreneurial context, in a future where online, remote-enabled work will likely be in demand, this is a great opportunity for students to learn how to build websites and create animated videos.
We’ll make each lesson plan available as soon as it’s finished. So if you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please click here.
Due to the accelerated pace we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration of the ExEC Online: Express Pack is designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.
Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!
Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)
Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?
If you know anyone who these new lessons might help, please invite them to participate! You can:
Thank you for all the work you’re doing, teaching and supporting young people during this challenging time – we’re grateful to have an opportunity to support you, and look forward to helping you however we can!
To help with the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve fast-tracked the development of new online-ready exercises – which you can use individually or as a set – called the ExEC Online: Express pack, available free through June.
Our second lesson, Financial Projection Simulator (FPS), is ready for you to use!
Making Finance Fun
Even in the best of times, students struggle to engage with and understand the financial elements of entrepreneurship. Of course, this topic is critically important, especially during times of economic uncertainty like we’re facing now.
To help make entrepreneurial finance more accessible to all students, we designed our Financial Projection Simulator to teach financial modeling, with a fun, game-like experience.
Encourage Experimentation
The Financial Projection Simulator leads students through an experimentation process where they make different assumptions about their financial model, including their:
Product price
Cost of Customer Acquisition
Employee salaries (including benefits & taxes)
Initial capital investments
Etc.
And as they enter their assumptions, the simulator automatically calculates the financial sustainability of their business, giving students a Red, Yellowor Greenassessment:
This question-based approach forces students to think through the major elements of a financial model in an approachable way. Plus, the real-time feedback encourages students to get creative, iterating their business model until they find one that’s profitable.
Engage Your Students
Like all of our lessons, the Financial Projection Simulator uses several resources to create an experiential, interactive experience for students online, including:
Step-by-step videos for students
Overview videos for you, like this:
When combined, these tools create an engaging experience for your students (even when they’re learning about finance ;).
The ExEC Online: Express Pack is a collection of free, interactive, online entrepreneurship lessons available through the rest of this term that you can easily plug into your class individually or as a set.
In addition to Financial Projection Simulator, we’re releasing three other exercises that are not only engaging, but particularly relevant in this time of uncertainty:
Problem-Inspired Idea Generation: We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. This exercise will show your students a systematic way to identify new opportunities inspired by their customer’s real-world problems that is particularly helpful during times of disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
How to Interview Customers: Now that business model assumptions have been flipped on their head, it’s more critical than ever that students learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover what problems they’re facing. A person with the skills to learn about how this new world will effect people individually, is a person that will thrive during this, and any future dramatic changes. This lesson will help students understand how to find customers to talk to, what questions to ask, and most importantly, why asking them will form the basis of a successful business model.
60 Minute MVP: The key to thriving in the face of high uncertainty and limited resources is efficient experimentation. This exercise will show your students how to quickly launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to measure demand for their products/services. Plus, even outside the entrepreneurial context, in a future where online, remote-enabled work will likely be in demand, this is a great opportunity for students to learn how to build websites and create animated videos.
We’ll be making each lesson plan available as soon as it’s finished, so if you’re interested in using any of the exercises from the ExEC Online: Express Pack, please fill out the form below.
Due to the accelerated pace we’re releasing these lessons, the first iteration of the ExEC Online: Express Pack is designed for use in colleges/universities in the US and Canada. Future iterations will be accessible to students across a wider range of environments.
Regardless of who or where you teach, we welcome you to request access and we’ll notify you if, and as soon as, we’re able to bring your students on board!
Get All the ExEC Online: Express Pack Lesson Plans (Free)
Know an Entrepreneurship Instructor?
If you know anyone who these new lessons might help, please invite them to participate! You can:
Thank you for all the work you’re doing teaching, and supporting, young people during this challenging time – we’re grateful to have an opportunity to support you, and look forward to helping you however we can!
More Details
:
Get the Syllabus
Get your copy on Google Docs
Get a copy of the syllabus on Google Docs:
