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.
Entrepreneurship Class Essentials with Steve Blank
Here is part 2 of our interview with entrepreneurship innovator and educator Steve Blank, where he shares his thoughts on what is essential for an entrepreneurship class and an entrepreneurship curriculum. If you missed part 1, you can catch up here.
Steve Blank is an icon in entrepreneurship education. He is known for developing the customer development method that launched the Lean Startup movement. A serial entrepreneur turned educator, Steve continues to elevate the field of entrepreneurship and greatly influences how we teach entrepreneurship principals.
Steve Blank on What is Essential to Teach in an Entrepreneurship Class
Increasing numbers of universities require students to take entrepreneurship courses. While Steve doesn’t believe these courses should be mandatory, he had very clear ideas on what the goal should be for entrepreneurship courses.
The truth is we will have students in our classes that are not interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Whether it’s because they’re taking the class because it’s required or whether they have a true interest in becoming an entrepreneur, we have a commitment to helping our students actualize their potential.
“How do we make a well-rounded individual in the 21st century?”
Steve shared that, at the core, entrepreneurship courses, build skills in tenacity, resilience, and agility in hypothesis testing. These skills are valid for all students, whether they want to be an entrepreneur or not. And it is his belief that these skills should be the foundation of a liberal arts education in the 21st century.
Particularly since the evolution of society and technology have created a shorter lifespan for most companies. By building up these skills, students will be able to access them as they go about building their careers. In addition, entrepreneurship classes will help identify future entrepreneurs.
However, these skills shouldn’t be limited to college learning. Steve envisions these methods being taught as part of a K-12 curriculum as well. Similar to the Korda Institute for Teaching, entrepreneurship can be integrated into classroom learning to bolster student skills, knowledge, and community impact. By designing educational experiences that utilize entrepreneurship principles, students can start learning early to solve problems that impact or involve their community.
Steve Blank’s 4 Essential Courses for Entrepreneurship Curriculum
We liked the idea of narrowing the focus of an entrepreneurship curriculum, but we also asked Steve if there were courses he deemed essential when designing a curriculum. Here are the four core entrepreneurial classes or concepts Steve believes should be included:
Creativity: This course includes customer discovery and helps students isolate the problems they want to solve.
Lean Launchpad Lite: This is a stripped-down version of Lean Launchpad which Steve believes can sometimes be bogged down with jargon. This class includes the framework and practical questions every entrepreneur needs to ask without a large focus on terminology.
Core Skills (or as Steve likes to put it “Fucking with your head”): This is a skill-building class focused on improving student’s resilience, tenacity, and agility. Lesson plans focus on hypothesis testing and fact-checking. In this class, students become more comfortable with chaos, uncertainty, and even failure.
Capstone: The capstone centers around the specific domain of expertise. For each university, it will vary with the region and the focus of the institution.
Designing Entrepreneurship Curriculum for the Students You Want to Attract
One of the questions we’re often asked is how to build a comprehensive curriculum. When put to Steve, he recommends keeping students top of mind when designing an entrepreneurship curriculum.
If I was in a university the first question I would ask for an educator is, am I building a curriculum for the students I have, or am I building a curriculum for the students I want to attract?
He shared the example of talking with some educators in Lincoln, Nebraska who work with farmers. The teachers were interested in putting together a class for farmers. The opportunity this presented for the university, in Steve’s words, “is they could become the Lean expert for farm entrepreneurship rather than replicating the other 7,000 versions of a general Lean Startup curriculum”. The question Steve encourages institutions and entrepreneurship professors to ask when designing curriculum are:
Is there a domain of expertise we can or should focus on?
Can we create a vertical version of Lean Startup for this area?
Teaching Minimum Viable Product
On the topic of buzzwords and jargon found in Lean Start-up, the idea of an MVP is one of the most often misunderstood concepts taught in entrepreneurship. Particularly, it can be difficult to teach.
One of the mistakes Steve discussed regarding the idea of a Minimum Viable Product or (MVP) is that businesses may understand finding a product to fit a certain market, but they stop there. Students and entrepreneurs alike need to understand that all components of the business model need to be tested and some of them need to be re-tested.
Therefore, when teaching MVP to students, finding customers who want particular features of a product or want the product is just Step 1 of a robust class. For example, we could also design a class around MVP’s for pricing. Students can test whether a product could sell for $20,000 rather than $9.99.
From customer discovery to learning how to pivot, an effective MVP course teaches students to run experiments across all components of commercialization.
Key Takeaway
Finishing out our discussion, Steve expressed the key takeaway he wants educators and universities alike to realize is that one-size-fits-all does not fit all for an entrepreneurship class. Whether we’re teaching tech, corporate, or social entrepreneurship, he encourages us to take our expertise and adjust our curriculums to get the right impedance match for the right students. In other words, treat our students like customers.
Our classes are our own little start-up.
Get our Next Free Lesson Plan
We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly. Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!
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.
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.
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.
Big thanks to Tristan Kromer at Kromatic for the heads up about this functionality. If you haven’t seen his Innovation Resources, definitely check them out.
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.
Get our Next Free Lesson Plan
We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly. Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!
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.
If you’re being asked to teach a hybrid, or “HyFlex” class, where some students are in person, and some are online and are worried about managing both environments, here are some tips for creating the best experience possible for your students:
Tip #1: Don’t Do It!
Engaging students is hard enough in-person. Engaging them online is more challenging. Now imagine trying to do both…simultaneously.
In some cases, hybrid classes are our administrations falling into the same trap as our entrepreneurs:
Afraid of losing customers, they’re trying to be everything to everyone. As a result, they’ll create a product no one wants.
To be clear, “HyFlex” classes have their place. Namely large, lecture-based classes with limited interaction.
If you’re teaching entrepreneurship however, your students will be best served by moving your classes online now. Remember that in-person classes, with everyone in masks and six feet apart, aren’t going to be the normal classes we remember:
So if you want to engage your students, online is the way to go. Plus, once you commit to going online, you can invest in creating a great class there.
Just like we teach our students…
We need to solve one problem well, not multiple problems poorly. Of course, you may not be entirely in control of the decision to go online.
If that’s true for you…
Tip #2: Teach Online to In-Person Students
If your hands are tied and you need to teach a hybrid class, knowing that:
You can’t engage students simultaneously on Zoom and in-person
In-person students will be socially distant from one another
All of your students will be better served if they are online, even when they’re “in-person.”
When your in-person students bring their laptops to class and everyone is on your video conference call (e.g. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.) you can:
Do virtual Post-It note exercises with all students simultaneously
Host class-wide discussions including everyone
Have small group breakouts
Ensure equitable access for all students
Having all of your students in one place, even if that place is online, will make the experience more manageable for you, and more engaging for your students.
Tip #3: Answer These Tech Questions
When setting up your hybrid classroom, there are a couple of questions you’ll need to answer (possibly with the help of your IT team):
How will in-person students be able to speak, and ask questions, so that your online students can hear them? You’ll need microphone(s) in your classroom to pick up the audio from your in-person students so your online students can hear.
How will online students be able to speak and ask questions without hearing feedback? You’ll need speakers in your classroom so your in-person students can listen to what the online students are saying. Unfortunately, the microphones required for question #1 above will often pick up the audio from those speakers, creating an annoying feedback loop where online students hear themselves talk with a slight delay (which will virtually guarantee they don’t participate in discussions).
How will online students be able to see who is speaking in the classroom? You’ll need at least two cameras in your classroom: 1) one facing towards the front of the room so online students can see when you’re speaking and 2) one facing towards your in-person students so the online students can see when an in-person student is talking. You’ll also want a way for the video conference software to automatically switch between those two cameras based on who is speaking.
How will in-person students present their work (e.g., pitches, presentations, etc.) so online students can see them? In-person students will need to simultaneously project their slides so that other in-person students can see them, while also screen sharing them so online students can see them.
How will online students present their work so that in-person students can see them? You’ll need to project your video conferencing software within your classroom so the in-person students can view presentations from online students.
Recommended Solution
The easiest way to solve all of the issues above is actually to follow Tip #2: Teach Online to In-Person Students. When all of your in-person students bring their laptops and headphones to class and log in to your virtual meeting – as long as they unmute their microphones whenever they want to speak – all of a sudden:
Online students can see and hear in-person students, and vice versa
You can have class-wide discussions without headaches
Anyone can easily present their camera, screen and/or slides
This solution, of course…
Begs the Question
If you’re just going to have in-person students attend online, what’s the point in having in-person classes at all?
To which we say…exactly.
Not only are hybrid classes infeasible from an engagement perspective, but they’re also a technical nightmare (see Tip #1: Don’t Do It, and avoid the headaches of hybrid classes from the beginning).
Tip #4: Use Online-Ready Exercises
If you’re following along, you know the most effective way to run hybrid classes will be online. With that in mind, the next step is to find online resources to use for your class.
Whether you use an online-ready curriculum like the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), or you assemble your own online activities, now is the time to start prepping your online class for Fall.
Note: ExEC’s Canvas, D2L, Blackboard, and Moodle templates can get your class set up in less than 5 minutes.
Our Students Deserve Better.
Our students weren’t disappointed with “online classes” last spring. They were disappointed by the way we delivered our online classes.
We didn’t have a chance to prep in Spring, but we should have no excuses for Fall.
Hybrid, or HyFlex classes, are just online classes with another name. If you invest in prepping your class to go online now, you can deliver the experience your students deserve.
Stay safe, and let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help you prep for Fall!
Whether or not your Fall starts online, it is almost certain that your Fall will finish online. As more colleges announce shifts online last week, Inside Higher Ed wrote:
“Colleges and universities [are] conceding that previously announced plans to resume in-person learning are no longer feasible.”
Between the social nature of students, the continuing spread of COVID, and the steps our schools will need to take once students start testing positive, it’s increasingly likely classes in the US will end up online this Fall.
Get Prepared
To help with your preparation, we’ve published an extremely flexible sample syllabus you can customize for just about any learning environment:
Whether your class ends up:
In-person
Online synchronous
Online asynchronous
Hybrid
…or transitions between them, the sample syllabus will show you how to design an engaging and structured course for Fall.
Sample Syllabus
To get your copy of the Universal Sample Syllabus click here.
Comprehensive Online Curriculum
In addition to the sample syllabus, you’ll get a preview of the checklist all of our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) instructors use to prepare their courses.
We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly. Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!
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:
Consistently Teaching with Adjuncts. The hardest part about coordinating classes taught by adjuncts is delivering a consistent experience when multiple instructors teach the same course.
Combine your Slides and Webcam. 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.
If you’re wondering whether your students are paying attention during your online lectures…they’re not.
To make your online lectures more engaging, check out these instructions on combining your slides and Webcam for your Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet sessions.
You can create the most amazing content, and deliver it in the most engaging manner. But if your students are in teams that are dysfunctional, or just sleepy, their learning can come to a screeching halt as they disengage.
Bonus: The Skills Scavenger Hunt exercise is also a great icebreaker, which can be extremely helpful in terms of fostering connections between students taking an online class.
Help your students unlock their purpose, and they will be motivated to learn the entire semester!
Especially in an online environment, you can more easily engage students by tapping into their intrinsic motivation. In other words, learn how to leverage students’ internal drivers and your class sessions will buzz with energy.
If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person for your entrepreneurship curriculum, including an entrepreneurship syllabus template and 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans, check out ExEC.
If you’d like lesson plans emailed to you directly, subscribe here to get the next one in your inbox.
The hardest part about coordinating classes taught by adjuncts is delivering a…
Consistent experience when multiple instructors teach the same course.
Especially true for Intro to Entrepreneurship classes, high turnover among adjuncts and different areas of expertise among faculty can mean students have vastly different experiences depending on who teaches their particular section.
This inconsistency often leads to lower enrollment and knowledge gaps that affect subsequent entrepreneurship classes.
Solution: “Flexible Structure”
To eliminate these inconsistencies while growing your entrepreneurship program, ensure your Intro to Entrepreneurship curriculum is all three of the following:
Experiential. Lecture-based classes not only neglect to teach students skills, they fail to inspire students to continue their entrepreneurial journey. To grow an entrepreneurship program, your first course needs to be both relevant and engaging – experiential classes can be both.
Structured. Experiential courses are great, but most educators don’t have time to design their own comprehensive set of experiences. Instead, they piecemeal activities from a variety of sources resulting in courses that lack a cohesive framework and leave gaps in students’ understanding. Having a coherent set of lesson plans that all instructors utilize means that students get both a robust and consistent experience.
Plus, a consistent framework makes onboarding new instructors much easier.
Flexible. Of course, structured curricula must also enable instructors to leverage their personal strengths (i.e. research specialties, entrepreneurial experiences, personal networks, etc.). The framework you use needs to be modular enough that it allows instructors to make the class their own, while still maintaining the core of the curriculum.
This unique “Flexible Structure” is precisely why so many…
Large Programs Use ExEC
The Experiential Entrepreneurship Curruciulm (ExEC) has become a popular choice when course coordinators want high-quality lessons that deliver consistent experiences across all sections.
For example, when Cal Poly’s Jonathan York wanted to improve his 500+ student / multi-instructor Intro to Entrepreneurship course, he chose ExEC:
Likewise, when Florida State University wanted to provide more structure for the instructors teaching their hundreds of entrepreneurship students, they adopted ExEC…
Cal Poly: 500+ Students and 10 Instructors
We recently sat down with Jonathan York of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to discuss his experience transitioning to ExEC and why he recommends it for other professors and universities looking to streamline their entrepreneurship curriculum.
Jon is Professor Emeritus of Entrepreneurship and Cofounder of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Cal Poly. Like most professors, when he began teaching entrepreneurship he found himself searching for and saving specific resources in Google Docs to help augment the textbook and lesson plans.
As an entrepreneurship professor, “I was constantly looking for more tools I could use in class,” he shares. While he felt capable of finding great resources to use in the classroom, once he needed to get his fellow professors and adjuncts on the same page, this method wasn’t sustainable. Cal Poly teaches over 500 entrepreneurship students a quarter with more than 10 professors and ever-changing adjunct faculty. Their entrepreneurship curriculum needs were larger than could be handled with Google Docs.
While looking for a solution to get his entrepreneurship department on the same page he found ExEC.
“ExEC helped bring everything I wanted to teach in one place.”
Adopting the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
When implementing ExEC, what stood out for Jon was that it was powerful to divide the quarter into two “sprints,” the first called “finding a problem worth solving” and the second “finding a solution worth building.” He recommends this strategy of “grouping the lessons into themes” divided into the 10 week quarter.
When Jon first started using ExEC, there were some tweaks in the first quarter, but after fine-tuning the timing for the lesson plans, he found it to be an easy switch from his previous approach of combining lots of tools coordinated through Moodle, which led to considerable student confusion and frustration.
While designed to be taught in 15-weeks, the ExEC curriculum clearly states the goals and objectives of each lesson. This helps professors easily group the lessons thematically for their quarter system.
The main benefit of using ExEC is it made it easier for Jon to ensure consistency in the entrepreneurship classes taught at Cal Poly. It helped unify the entrepreneurship department and align professors and adjuncts alike with not just what was going to be taught with entrepreneurship, but how.
Adjunct professors in particular may be successful entrepreneurs but new to teaching. Of teaching entrepreneurship, Jon says, “You don’t just want warhorses sitting around telling stories.”
The goal of an entrepreneurship class is to engage.
When they rolled out ExEC with the Cal Poly faculty, Jon held weekly meetings to help with any questions or trouble-shooting, which is what he recommends for any organization looking to adopt ExEC. He started with 3 professors using the curriculum with other professors observing. This helped identify any tweaks that may be needed with the timing of lesson plans and solidified the staff’s confidence in using ExEC.
With any new tool, there’s a certain learning curve to be expected. However, when adopting ExEC, professors aren’t alone in trying to figure out how to teach the lesson plans. We offer a comprehensive and responsive customer service not found with a traditional textbook.
Engaging Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans
Overall, the rollout of ExEC at Cal Poly was successful. Jon really enjoyed the Early Adopter modules and the Business Model Canvas (BMC) aspects of the ExEC curriculum. For instance, the BMC lesson is designed to provide an overview showing where each lesson fits into the overall curriculum, it also provides professors with a view of the big picture – where they’ve been, where they are, and where they are going. Think of the Business Model Canvas as the map that shows the flow of lesson plans throughout the curriculum.
When teaching any of the lesson plans to his entrepreneurship students, he had this to say: “your pre-class materials prepared my students better than anything I have used before.” Unlike a textbook that puts the onus on the instructor to prepare how to teach the information, ExEC includes thorough instructions for how to prepare before class, including all the necessary resources to use during class.
We also include information on what students should do after class to help create an experience that resonates beyond the classroom.
We have found that this dramatically cuts down on any necessary prep-time for the professor. It also creates a comprehensive curriculum that engages every student, whether your entrepreneurship program is large or small.
An Evolving Curriculum
We know that experiential education is really difficult to execute. We’ve created a foolproof system to teach each lesson successfully.
Our goal is that your students are engaged with each lesson throughout the entire entrepreneurship curriculum.
When asked if he would recommend ExEC to other professors or universities looking to expand their entrepreneurship curriculum beyond a traditional textbook, Jon answered, “Yes. With each iteration, it keeps getting better.”
The average print textbook is considered out of date in 3 years. In the ever-evolving world of entrepreneurship, time is invaluable. With ExEC, updates to entrepreneurship lesson plans happen immediately and are implemented seamlessly. This helps keep your university’s program on the cutting edge of entrepreneurship education.
We pride ourselves in practicing what we preach. We’ve applied the invaluable feedback we received from professors and students alike in our latest version of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC). We’ve designed it to include the best practices of entrepreneurship education. And after just 2 years, ExEC is now being used at almost 100 universities!
If you want more engagement, more structure, and more impact, now is your chance with ExEC!
Start Engaging this Fall with ExEC
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.
Get our Next Free Lesson Plan
We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly. Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!
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:
10 Free Tools for Increasing Student Engagement Online. A variety of free tools are reviewed that will increase online student engagement. Keeping students engaged in online classes is difficult. These tools make it easy.
“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 interviewing, 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.
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!
Skills Scavenger Hunt: Online Icebreaker & Team Building Exercise
If students don’t form into high-performance teams, their learning curve significantly flattens.
You can create the most amazing content, and deliver it in the most engaging manner. But if your students are in teams that are dysfunctional, or just sleepy, their learning can come to a screeching halt as they disengage.
Students put the course content into practice in their team environment where they apply it to bring ideas that matter to them to life. Student teams formed randomly erode the student (and professor!) experience through internal conflict and apathy.
Helping students form high-functioning teams will boost their learning capability exponentially.
We built our concept of high performing teams on the idea of matching students based on aligned goals and diverse skills. We developed our Skills Scavenger Hunt to facilitate that process and thus mitigate the biggest drawbacks of student team projects.
BONUS: This exercise is also an incredible icebreaker, which is critically important to do in an online course environment.
In this exercise, students go on a scavenger hunt to find other students with complementary skills in the following categories:
Graphics
Technology
Social Media
Design
Sales
Marketing
Step 1: What Skills Do You Have?
Each student checks any boxes in all 6 areas that are applicable to them. They may be able to check more than one box in a particular area, and they may not be able to check any boxes in a particular area. This doesn’t matter – the goal with this exercise is for students to identify their gaps in skills and fill them with qualified teammates.
If students check any boxes for their skills, that particular column will turn dark grey – to indicate they do not need to add any potential teammate names or notes.
To see the entire Skills Scavenger Hunt Exercise enter your email below!
Step 2: The Group’s Skills
In each group (face-to-face, or in Zoom breakout rooms if running a class online) the person whose birthday is coming up next is the facilitator. This person goes through each of the boxes asking if anyone has that skill/experience. If someone does, the facilitator asks them to share, in 30 seconds or less, details about how/why they achieved that experience.
As this process evolves, each student writes down names and quick notes about any students who possess skills that student doesn’t possess.
Step 3: The Group’s Skills v2.0
Repeat Step 2 again, but with students shuffled into new groups. Once again, the person whose birthday is coming up next is the facilitator.
Step 4: Filling In Skills Gaps
After the class session, students should post in a discussion board on your LMS what skills they possess and a quick sentence about that particular skill. Students with gaps in their worksheet can identify other students to fill those gaps on this discussion board.
When students finish this exercise, their worksheet sections should look something like those below.
Graphics
Here we are interested specifically in skills related to image editing, graphic design (logos and other assets), and video editing.
Technology
Here we are interested specifically in skills related to coding in HTML and JavaScript, and writing mobile apps.
Social Media
Here we are interested specifically in skills related to building an engaged community of followers on various platforms like Instagram, Youtube, and Reddit.
Design
Here we are interested specifically in skills related to interviewing, user interface design, and usability testing.
Sales
Here we are interested specifically in skills related to online advertising, selling product online, and running a profitable business.
Marketing
Here we are interested specifically in skills related to publishing writing, email marketing, and event planning.
Get your copy of the Skills Scavenger Hunt Worksheet here and keep your students motivated all semester!
Help students execute better, and conflict less, by empowering them to successfully assemble their own high-performing teams.
Get our Next Free Lesson Plan
We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly. Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!
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 interviewing, 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.
