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Delight Your Students This Fall

Delight Your Students This Fall

Gift your students an unforgettable experience this Fall!

With better team engagement . . .

With quick video submissions . . .

With a simplified LMS implementation . . .

ExEC delivers an engaging, structured course for any teaching format that faculty at nearly 200 colleges and universities have been using for years. For more details on using this award-winning curriculum this Fall, request a full preview today!

Preview ExEC Now

Here is how ExEC will WOW! you and your students.

Easy Team Collaboration

We have updated our platform to allow team collaboration with literally a few clicks.

Students complete exercises within our curriculum and then with a few clicks can invite other students to collaborate on that particular exercise. See this in action below:

For instance, many of our students work on a Business Model Canvas. They get frustrated sharing paper copies, or emailing ideas, or struggling with a clunky Google doc version.

Collaborating should be productive, not frustrating.

With ExEC, students easily collaborate on one Canvas, in real time, within the platform.

Quick Video Submission

Video submissions are a great way for students to meaningfully reflect on their experience. This reflective approach encourages students to improve and learn from their mistakes. Video submissions have been a juggling act of multiple tools like iPhones, Zoom, and Google Drive.

Until now!

In our new video submission process students record their reflection with the click of a button, and instantly get a link to the video they can turn in. With our next iteration of ExEC:

We leverage technology to keep the focus on the learning experience.

The student experience is not all we have improved!

New LMS Generator

With ExEC’s LMS integration, preparing your class is easy. Give us the first and last day of class, any holidays, what LMS you use, what days of the week classes happen, and the length of class sessions.

Our technology builds an LMS package specific to your course so all you do is upload it and your course is ready to go.

With ExEC, spend your time diving into detailed lesson plans, not tinkering with the LMS

ExEC Integrates with all LMS

Engage Students

Students want simple, interactive experiences.

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) is a cohesive toolset of structured activities that will build students’ entrepreneurial skills. For example:

Try ExEC this Fall and transform your and your students’ experience.

Preview ExEC Now


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share more engaging resources we are developing for entrepreneurship educators to transform their classrooms!

Subscribe here to be the first to get these resources delivered to your inbox!

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!

Quick Slide: Why Prototyping Is Essential

Quick Slide: Why Prototyping Is Essential

Prototyping can make students anxious because they’ve learned to fear failure.

It’s our job to reframe failures as learning opportunities.

Like the Micheal Jordan slide, you can use these slides to change how your students think about failure:

prototyping

This sets you up to introduce prototyping not as building products, but as running experiments:

prototyping

Combine these with the 60 Minute MVP exercise and your students will discover that…

Prototyping is a powerful (and fun) way to get customer feedback.

Specifically, students learn:

  • How to create a landing page (basic website) or application prototype/wireframe
  • How to create an explainer video
  • How to collect some form of currency to measure the effectiveness of their MVP

So, if you want to show your students the power of prototyping try the 60-Minute MVP and…


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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:

  • Videos to Improve Student Presentations. Here are videos to teach students to deliver presentations that make their audience feel something.
  • How to Grow a Top 50 Entrepreneurship Program. Learn 5 concrete steps you can take to grow your entrepreneurship program, as shared by leaders to Top 50 programs.
  • Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
  • 2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
ExEC Can Be Your Fall Curriculum

ExEC Can Be Your Fall Curriculum

Fall will be here before you know it!

Do you want students engaged from day one?

Do you want a simplified grading process?

Do you want award-winning detailed lesson plans?

Whether you will teach:

  • In-person
  • Online synchronous
  • Online asynchronous
  • Hybrid

ExEC delivers an engaging and structured course that faculty at nearly 200 colleges and universities have been using for years. For more details on using ExEC this Fall, request a full preview today!

Preview ExEC Now

Here is what ExEC can do for you and your students.

Engage Students

Students want you to replace your lectures with interactive experiences.

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) is a cohesive toolset of structured activities that will build students’ entrepreneurial skills. For example:

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Organization

Easily Deliver a Consistent Experience

Students enjoy a consistent and structured learning experience.

ExEC is a fully experiential and extremely well-organized curriculum for any class structure – 8, 10, 12, or 16 weeks, quarter system or accelerated MBA schedule.

You get a well-organized schedule of topics that guide students to:

problems and solutions

Preview ExEC Now

Get The Tools To Enjoy Your Experience

ExEC makes planning and grading faster, so you can spend your time guiding your students. You get dozens of extremely detailed lesson plans to minimize your prep time!

Plus with ExEC’s LMS integration, prepping for your class is easy. With a couple clicks, you upload your entire class into your LMS so you have time to dive into the detailed lesson plans.

ExEC Integrates with all LMS

Preview ExEC Now

Use a Curriculum So Students Enjoy Their Experience

ExEC uses fully integrated, objective rubrics that make grading a snap and provide students valuable feedback to improve their skill development.

objective rubric

For your students, ExEC provides elegant, graphically pleasing slides for every class session to maximize engagement.

what is an mvp?

 

Give Your Students Engagement, Quality, and Structure

ExEC is an award-winning, peer-reviewed, experiential curriculum that engages students in building entrepreneurial skills.

Try ExEC this Fall and transform your and your students’ experience.

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Logo


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share more engaging resources we are developing for entrepreneurship educators to transform their classrooms!

Subscribe here to be the first to get these resources delivered to your inbox!

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!

Inspirational Video: Don’t You Dare

Inspirational Video: Don’t You Dare

Have your students ever shut down when they were out of their comfort zone?

My students absolutely have, many times. Two students come to mind:

    1. I had a student who, for years, talked about her dream job: becoming a forensic accountant. One summer, a fantastic company posted a forensic accounting internship near her hometown, but she wasn’t going to apply for it. When I asked why, she said she didn’t think she could compete for it. I asked her for a Zoom call, played a video like the one below, and spent the next hour helping her believe she was worthy of the internship. She didn’t get the internship that summer. But she did get it the next summer!
    2. Another student wanted to start a landscaping business. He didn’t believe he could make enough money to cover the cost to buy all the equipment. I helped him discover ways to borrow and rent equipment while he tested out his sales and service strategies and before he tried booking his first client, I sent him a video like the one below. Within a year, he had 30 clients and 2 employees.

If your students need some encouragement to believe in themselves, consider showing them some of these videos:

Entrepreneurship ask students to learn from their failures.

Of course, most of our students have been taught to fear failure and as a result, are fearful of even talking to customers, let alone trying to sell them something.

To combat that, you can use the video below to help your students learn that life isn’t about how well they avoid failure, it’s about how well they learn from it:

dream big

An experiential entrepreneurship classroom can be a stressful place for our students.

It’s full of uncertainty, challenge, and vulnerability. Many believe they can’t accomplish the things we ask of them. Many believe they can’t achieve their dreams.

Levity also goes a long way toward helping students feel more comfortable and confident. For a fun and lighthearted way to inspire your students, invite the “President” in for a pep talk:

inspirational video

Whenever your students are about to try something new, consider leveraging videos like these to give them a boost in confidence.

Show a video before they…

If you want to inspire your students, videos speak volumes!


Access Slides With These, and Many More, Videos Embedded


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share more videos to motivate your students, and exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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:

  • Quick Slide: Michael Jordan was a Failure. How Michael Jordan leverages failure to make him better.
  • The NEW Marshmallow Challenge. Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
  • Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
  • 2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
Quick Slide: Why Customer Interviews Work

Quick Slide: Why Customer Interviews Work

If your students are hesitant to interview customers, use the next in our series of free slides to help them understand…

We demonstrate to students that interviews are great for validating their Channel assumptions by asking them…

“If you can’t find people willing to talk about the problem you want to solve, where will you find people willing to buy your solution?”

For that reason, students learn:

“Trying to interview customers is always helpful…even if you don’t get any!”

  • If you get interviews, great!  You’ll learn about your customers, their problems, your competition, and your marketing channels.
  • If you can’t get interviews, great! You’ll save time and money knowing the channel you just tested won’t work. Best to iterate your assumptions and try again.

If you want to motivate your students to leverage the power of customer interviews…


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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:

  • Quick Slide: Michael Jordan was a Failure. How Michael Jordan leverages failure to make him better.
  • The NEW Marshmallow Challenge. Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
  • Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
  • 2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
Quick Slide: Why Business Plans Fail

Quick Slide: Why Business Plans Fail

This is a fun slide to..

Introduce the difference between business plans and business experiments.

This is a great slide when you’re introducing:

  • The Business Model Canvas. You can tell students, “Like boxing, entrepreneurship isn’t about how well you plan; it’s about how well you respond when your plan doesn’t work. That’s why in this class you’ll learn how to use the Business Model Canvas to identify the weaknesses of your business model early so you can learn how to test and strengthen it from day one.”
  • Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). You can tell students, “Instead of planning an expensive and elaborate first product launch (that will most likely fail), Minimum Viable Products let you launch small, inexpensive experiments to quickly test elements of your business model. Their low cost and fast development time mean in the very likely scenario that your original assumptions are wrong, you’ll have plenty of time and money to build multiple MVPs and incorporate what you learn from the market in real-time.”

What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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:

Quick Slide: “Everyone” Isn’t a Customer Segment

Quick Slide: “Everyone” Isn’t a Customer Segment

This is a fun slide that…

Alex Osterwalder uses to demonstrate the importance of defining customer segments and value propositions.

This slide is inspired by our workshop with Alex Osterwalder, one of the creators of the Business Model Canvas, and we think it’s a great slide to show when you’re:

  • Introducing the Business Model Canvas. You can tell students, “This is why we define our customer segments and value propositions.”
  • Contrasting building products with solving problems. You can tell students, “He may have the most revolutionary invention in the world, but if he can’t explain it in a way that resolves a need for customers, no one cares.”
  • Demonstrating how (not) to pitch. It’s a lighthearted way to start a lesson on pitching.

What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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:

Quick Slide: Entrepreneurship Isn’t About Starting a Company

Quick Slide: Entrepreneurship Isn’t About Starting a Company

The next in our series of free slides you can add to your entrepreneurship lessons will help…

Make entrepreneurship skills relevant, even to students who don’t think they’ll start companies.

At their core…

Entrepreneurship skills are about learning to solve problems in mutually beneficial ways.

In this way, these skills benefit students no matter whether they:

  • start a company
  • join a company
  • volunteer at a non-profit
  • start a school club

…or anything in between. To remind students of that, we use slides like this one in our curriculum. In particular, we recommend you try it in your lessons on:

  • Idea generation
  • Customer interviewing
  • Design Thinking

…and of course, on the very first day of class!


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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:

  • Quick Slide: Michael Jordan was a Failure. How Michael Jordan leverages failure to make him better.
  • The NEW Marshmallow Challenge. Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
  • Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
  • 2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
Quick Slide: Jordan Was a Failure

Quick Slide: Jordan Was a Failure

We’re starting a series of emails where we’ll send you slides you can quickly add to your entrepreneurship lessons.

Here’s the first one. A quote from Michael Jordan on failure:

Michael Jordan Failure

This can be a great slide for:

  • Introducing growth mindset
  • Normalizing failure / failure resume
  • Designing experiments

…or to emphasize that the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that learn from their failures.


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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 NEW Marshmallow Challenge.Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
  • Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
  • Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
  • 2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
  • “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!
Improve Student Evaluations With Lean Teaching

Improve Student Evaluations With Lean Teaching

What happens when we apply Lean Startup principles like “Build, Measure, Learn” to our own teaching?
Our team’s experience: Vastly increased engagement.
Lean Startup helps entrepreneurs shift from “build it and they will come” to “Build, Measure, Learn.” So we wanted to know what happens if we apply the same principles to our teaching? Are there benefits to a “Teach, Measure, Learn” loop?
Lean Teaching - Teach, Measure, Learn
We’ve seen huge benefits (higher student evals, increased enrollment, awards won, etc.), so we wanted to share our process with you.
If you’re looking to increase student engagement give “Teach, Measure, Learn” a shot.

Step 1: Pick a Lesson to Improve

Start small; don’t worry about changing your entire class. The easiest way to get started is by just picking the lesson you’re most excited to improve. How do you decide which one?

  • Which lesson is the least fun for you?
  • Which lesson is the least fun for your students?

Whichever lesson you pick, the most important thing is that you feel excited about improving it.

We recently used this process to test some improvements to our Financial projection Simulator.

Whether it’s the lessons we make freely available like the 60 Minute MVP) or the lessons in our comprehensive Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum, we test every exercise to explore ways to improve them.

Step 2: Ask a Friend to Sit In

The next step is to find an instructor whose teaching style you and/or your students really enjoy. How do you find them?

  • Ask your students who their favorite instructors are.
  • Are there are instructors at your institution who have won a teaching award (it could be at the College level, at the university level, or on a national level)? Ask around to identify them.
  • Do you have a colleague at another school whose teaching style you respect? As you’ll see, the person you ask to observe doesn’t need to be from your school!

Once you identify that instructor, ask them to sit in on the class session you want to improve. On the class day, tell your students this instructor is auditing the class session to see how it works. (you don’t want to bias your students by telling them you want to improve the lesson until after it is over).

Doan testing a new lesson plan as Justin observes remotely via Zoom.

Our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org team is fully distributed – I’m in San Francisco, Doan is in Ohio, and Federico is in Italy but with Zoom it’s easy for us to sit in on each other’s classes.

We usually have one camera in the back of the room so we can see the instructor and one camera in the front of the room (sometimes just a phone logged into Zoom) so we can see how students are responding to the lesson.

 

A camera at the front of the room makes it easy to see when students are engaged and when they are tuning out.

Don’t let location be a barrier to improving your teaching!

With Zoom and a little help from your IT team, you can literally get feedback from any instructor in the world on how to improve a lesson.

Step 3: What Feedback Do You Want?

Before you teach the lesson with your observer, think through what feedback you want. We all teach so differently, it will be important for the person providing you feedback to know the type of feedback you would like on the lesson. Some things we focus on:

  • Are students engaged during the entire lesson? When does energy drop; when do students start to look zoned out or pick up their phones?
  • Does the lesson have a successful “ah ha” moment? If not, how might you create one?
  • Are there any logistical questions that can be eliminated by better instructions (i.e., questions about how to do the exercise aren’t productive, but lessons about how to apply the principles are welcome)
  • Did students actively and eagerly participate in any discussions? If not, how might you improve the discussions?

Step 4: Ask for student feedback

There’s no better way to model to students how and why they should listen to their customers than when you ask for their feedback.

After teaching the lesson you want to improve, give your students an opportunity to provide anonymous feedback about it. For us, we use a slide like this

Slide to get student feedback

which links to a survey like this

Student feedback survey

All of the information is anonymous (unless students volunteer to give us their email address). We simply ask students to fill out the survey before they leave class.

Step 5: Integrate the Feedback

After the class session, talk with the person who sat in the class as they go through their notes. If the person is an experienced and awarded instructor, ask for tips and tricks for anything they notice. Even if they see something as engaging, positive or productive, ask for their ideas on how you can improve.

If there are points where they offer constructive criticism, or where they saw student engagement wane, ask for specific advice on tips and tricks to improve and combine that with the feedback you got from your students.

Results

By practicing what you preach to students in terms of continuous improvement, you’ll not only increase the quality of your lessons, you’ll also demonstrate to students that you care about them – both of which can lead to improved evaluations.

We use this technique for each of the exercises we release, including all of the lessons in the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), and the insights we gain have a tremendous impact on quality.


What’s Next?

In upcoming posts, we will share exercises to engage your students.

Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!


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 NEW Marshmallow Challenge.Use this exercise to teach students why invalidated assumptions hinder all new initiatives, and are ultimately the downfall of most new companies.
  • Marketing MVPs. In this experiential exercise, students launch real ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to test demand for their MVPs
  • Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
  • 2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
  • “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!