Join us for the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Digital Conference and you will work live with Julie’s students at Millikin University on an exercise focused on estimation, iteration, and failure.
Watch Julie teach a real lesson, with real students, during the conference!
In this session, you will:
Watch Julie teach her iteration, experimentation and failure exercise in real-time
See how Julie’s students respond in real-time
Interact with, and provide feedback to, Julie and her students
Are you looking for exciting tools and exercises to engage your students and enrich your classroom? You are why we created our Digital Conference Experiment!
Register with discount code DigitalConferenceMVP for a 50% discount!
Julie is Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Millikin University, is an entrepreneur through the historic farm she owns, and is an educator whose energy and passion for igniting students’ entrepreneurial spirit will leave you wanting more!
Join us for this unique digital conference format; we will guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises to:
Enable your students to work on big ideas
Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Help your students with problem validation.
At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!
How to create a true entrepreneurial experience for your students
In the video above Doan explains his exercise for getting comfortable thinking creatively!
If you want your students to get truly excited about your class from the first day, or refresh your own experience as a teacher, read on!
This exercise will get your students feeling:
The creative energy that comes with brainstorming a new business model
The anxiety of making a sales pitch
The exhilaration of making their first sale
The inspiration that comes from seeing they too can build a profitable business
In this exercise, we explore the question: How can we provide students a true entrepreneurial experience within a classroom context? In other words, how can we make it real?
“The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.”
– Seymour Papert
This article is a collaboration with Dr. Doan Winkel, the John J. Kahl, Sr. Chair in Entrepreneurship and Director of the Edward M. Muldoon Center for Entrepreneurship at John Carroll University (and co-founder of TeachingEntrepreneurship.org). He developed this exercise so his students with had a powerful learning experience about entrepreneurship during the first moments of his course.
Doan developed this exercise to provide his students with the opportunity to experience entrepreneurship on the very first day of my entrepreneurship course. Students are placed in a situation that reflects many of the pressures, constraints, and reward incentives of new business creation in a compressed 30 minute time frame.
Doan’s complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s a quick overview.
Step 1: The Set Up
Scout out a location with plenty of shops and foot traffic. You’ll want this location to be nearby so students don’t lose too much time traveling. Doan gets students off campus so it feels more “real”, but some educators may be able to conduct the exercise on campus depending on the density of stores and foot traffic.
This location is where the class will meet on the first day. Once you decide on a location, be sure to get the word out to students regarding when and where to meet soon after registration begins. Send a selfie at the meeting spot, Google Maps coordinates, and anything else to help students find you on the first day of class. Email students reminders multiple times, including the day before classes start, to make sure you inform students as they add and drop courses. In case anyone does not get the message, put a notice in your classroom reminding students that the first meeting was offsite and to wait in the classroom until everyone returns – about 45 minutes.
You will be grouping students into teams of four, so get enough cash in $1 bills so that every team can start with $10.
Be sure to confirm with your institution that you are allowed to give students cash to use in the exercise
If your institution does not allow you to provide the cash, also let students know they need to bring 2 or 3 $1 bills with them the first day of class (depending on team size you will use).
Step 2: Class-time
Meet your students at the chosen location, team them up in groups of 4 as they arrive, and hand 10 $1 bills to each group.
Step 3: Announce the challenge
Teams have 30 minutes to make as much money as they can, legally. Whichever team makes the most profit, keeps all the money from all the groups.
Winner takes all!
Don’t provide any other specific guidance. Students will want to ask questions. Don’t answer them – walk away after reminding them to meet you back in the classroom in 35 minutes.
Step 4: Debrief
As teams arrive in the classroom, note on the board the profit made by each group and collect their money. Determine the winning team and disperse the winnings.
Start a debrief about the experience, starting with the winning team.
Questions to address can include:
How did they arrive at decisions? Negotiate? Pivot their business idea?
Did students work individually or as a team? Why?
How did the ambiguity feel?
How did it feel using someone else’s capital?
How did they identify a market need?
How did they identify and connect with customers?
See the complete lesson plan below for more ideas and topics to cover.
Results
Hopefully many will feel excited and motivated by the learning experience and competition. This will provide the following benefits:
Get students excited about class from day 1
Get your students feeling the emotions of entrepreneurship: excitement, anxiety, confidence, inspiration
Re-energize yourself with a more experiential class
Build familiarity and bonding amongst students.
Identify students who need more support with this teaching style.
By having students go through this exercise early in the course schedule, you can draw on their experiences when developing ideas throughout the term.
In addition, the exercise
creates a unique experience for students on the first day of class,
sets the tone for things to come, and
gets everyone (including you!) out into the world for some real learning in real time
Get the “Making It Real” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Making It Real” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Companies aren’t built in classrooms. They’re built in often ambiguous and rapidly evolving markets with limited resources while imposing tremendous pressures on founders. Let your students discover what strengths they bring to a team of entrepreneurs.
If you want to learn and practice exercises to better engage your students and learn how to assess experiential learning, join us on May 10th. Jim Hart, Julienne Shields, and our very own Justin Wilcox will use our unique digital conference format to guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises they introduce to:
Enable your students to work on big ideas
Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Help your students with problem validation.
At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!
This exercise will help your students develop more creative ideas and more creative solutions to problems!
How do we Teach Creative Confidence?
In the video above Jim Hart explains his exercise for getting comfortable thinking creatively!
This article is a collaboration with Jim Hart at Southern Methodist University, who developed this exercise to enable students to be more confident thinking creatively by breaking through their fear/judgment barriers. This exercises teaches students how to recognize what an impulse feels like, and to allow themselves to follow an impulse without judging or fearing it.
Jim’s complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s a quick overview.
The Set-up
To help students feel more comfortable being uncomfortable, show a clip from “Whose Line is it Anyway?” demonstrating improvisation theater, like this one:
Tell your students that this exercise will help become more creative, so they can work on the ideas that matter to them and that will challenge them because they are more creative ideas.
Tell the students that you’re all going to play a fun game like what you just showed them in the clip, where you may all look a little foolish. Encourage them to allow themselves to look a bit foolish.
Because students may feel a bit uncomfortable during this exercise, you need to
Create an atmosphere where it is safe to be open-minded and say anything.
Explicitly tell your students they will not be graded on this exercise.Reassure them that each of them has really creative ideas in them, but that most of us struggle to be creative publicly because we are afraid of sounding or looking foolish.
Attempt #1
Place students standing in a circle, facing inward. Randomly pick two students. One is Student A, the other Student B, and they exchange as follows:
B: “What are you doing?”
A: [says a random activity – for instance, “eating a banana”]
B: [mimes the activity A just mentioned]
A: “What are you doing?”
B: [says a random activity – for instance, “riding a bicycle”]
A: [mimes the activity B just mentioned]
B: “What are you doing?”
The two students continue to do this until one of them pauses in answering the “What are you doing?” question. When one pauses, make a buzzer noise and tell that student he/she is out. Go to the next student in the circle, and they begin again with the remaining student from the original pair.
What typically happens is that students worry about what their peers are thinking and so are consistently and quickly buzzed out of the exercise.
Prep for Attempt #2
After roughly 20 minutes, stop Attempt #1. Tell the students the following story:
In the movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays an American Civil War hero who is brought to Japan to fight and defeat the samurai. He is eventually captured and the samurai take him to their camp in the mountains. Winter arrives and Cruise is stuck at the samurai camp until the winter weather passes. The samurai start teaching Cruise their ways, but he cannot compete with their sword skills.
Play the following clip:
Tell your students they are minding too much, that you don’t want them using their mind.
Encourage your students to let their impulses guide their words.
Get your students excited by telling them that you will teach them a technique to dramatically increase the time they can last in this exercise, and that they will reap the following benefits:
They will become more effective communicators.
They will develop more creative ideas for solutions to problems.
Attempt #2
Stand in the circle of students. Have your students close their eyes and imagine they are sitting in a movie theater, looking at a movie screen. That screen is their mind’s eye, and they will see images on it. Tell them you will say a word and they should allow the image to pop onto the movie screen in front of them; they should allow the image to pop into their mind.
Ask your students to say “got it” when they’ve got an image of the word you say in their mind.
Say “apple” [students say “got it”]. Say “tire” [students say “got it”], say “desk”, “blue sky”, “birds”, “samurai” (each time waiting until the students say “got it”).
Have your students to open their eyes. Stand in front of each student and ask them to nod when they have the word you’ll say to them in their mind’s eye. Say a random word to each student, wait until they nod, then move to the next student, and do this with each student.
Now conduct the original exercise again, starting with the original student pair. Wait until one student pauses too long, buzz them out, add the next student, and so on.
Results
This exercise will help students follow their impulses and allow themselves to get into a stream of consciousness without judging it.
If your students can be more aware of the images and words in their consciousness, they can improve their creative confidence.
When your students are more creatively confident, they will develop stronger ideas and solutions to problems, and will engage in richer communication. This can be particularly useful if you have them making pitches later in the semester.
In the pitch process, students need to be very clear about every word they are saying, and need to be comfortable telling stories so they engage their audience. If they are more aware of the images and words they are trying to communicate, they should be better storytellers. This exercise will help them build that awareness!
Complete details to bring this exercise to life in your class, including all the instructions for you, are in the lesson plan below.
Get the “In My Mind’s Eye, Horatio” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “In My Mind’s Eye, Horatio” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.
Thank You to Jim Hart
A big thanks to Jim for creating and sharing this exercise! For more information about Jim and the amazing work he’s doing at Southern Methodist University, click here.
If you want to learn and practice exercises to better engage your students, and learn how to assess experiential learning, join us on May 10th. Jim, Julienne Shields, and our very own Justin Wilcox will use our unique digital conference format to guide you through experimenting with the tools and exercises they introduce to:
Enable your students to work on big ideas
Engage your students in entrepreneurial skills and mindset
Help your students with problem validation.
At this conference, you won’t learn by listening, you’ll learn by doing!
“[Creativity] may be harder to find in older children and adults because their creative potential has been suppressed by a society that encourages intellectual conformity.” (Baumol, 1999: 93)
Entrepreneurship is about innovation, problem solving, and creativity. We understand the innovation process well, and how to solve problems. Creativity is the elusive piece…
How do we Teach Creativity?
In the video above Dr. Emma Fleck explains her exercise for supercharging student creativity!
This article is a collaboration with Emma Fleck at Susquehanna University who developed this exercise to stimulate creative imagination by taking students back in time to when they were overflowing with creative confidence. Students get to embody their own superhero through imaginative play and the use of costumes, masks, and icons which represent this powerful time in their lives.
Her complete lesson plan is available to download below, but here’s a quick overview.
Step 1: Before Class
Your 5-Year-Old Students
Before this exercise, your students should ask family members what they were like as 5-year-olds.
They can talk to parents, grandparents, siblings, etc. – anyone who knew them at that age. It’s critical for this exercise they are reminded of their younger, more creative selves.
Encourage your students to bring a memento – a stuffed animal, a picture, etc. – something that represents that time in their lives.
TED Talk
In addition, any good lesson on creativity in schools should begin with Sir Ken Robinson’s classic TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?“, and Tony Schwartz’ article “How to Think Creatively“. Assign this video or reading to be completed before your next class.
Have a discussion with your students about the role of creativity in education, and whether the American education system supports or detracts from creativity.
Some of these ideas are controversial and can stir up a healthy debate. Take advantage of that to engage your students in a lively discussion.
Continue with a discussion of creativity in the entrepreneurial process, and how we can be more creative.
Step 3: Who is Your Superhero?
Here is your chance to be a superhero! Don a mask, a cape, and any other superhero accoutrement – sell your students on the excitement of remembering their superhero dreams!
Take your students back to when they were 5 years old. Ask them:
What inspired them?
Who did they look up to?
What did they dream they would be when they grew up?
What were their favorite activities/toys?
What were the limitations in their lives?
Take your students back to a time when there were no imaginary boundaries, no limitations, and when they had the ability to see the world in a different capacity. Encourage your students to share about their past, their history, through what they learned from family members.
Step 4: Become Your Superhero
Ask your students what happened between when they were 5 years old and today. What happened to those dreams of astronauts and figure skaters? This discussion brings a large dose of reality (and excuses!) into the room.
Fill your classroom with costumes, masks, and craft materials.
Play music from when your students were 5 years old. Play superhero music. Encourage your students to embody their 5 year old superhero. Take lots of pictures, and encourage your students to take lots of pictures – these will come in handy later in the semester as reminders to embody that superhero, when they find themselves in a creativity rut.
Talk about superhero characteristics.
Drive home the notions of endless possibilities & no limitations that encapsulate what their concept of a superhero ignites in them.
Step 5: Reflecting on Creativity
Ask your students to write a reflection based on these questions:
How do you feel during this exercise? What element of this exercise had the most impact on you? Why?
How can we capture that feeling of creativity and lack of imagination as our 5-year old selves and use it for future endeavors within entrepreneurial problem solving?
This works well later in the semester when you need your students to think around problems, to imagine endless possibilities and no limitations.
Remind them of their superhero and enable them to take the leap!
Results
This exercise has been tested over an 18-month period within four entrepreneurship courses:
A high-school summer entrepreneurship course (17 students aged 15-18)
An undergraduate introduction to entrepreneurship course (24 students aged 18-19)
Two upper division undergraduate entrepreneurship courses (48 students in total aged 20-23)
In gleaning feedback from all participants, Emma noted the following:
If left as a single touch point, this exercise has limited impact. The reflective elements outlined above are essential to the success of the exercise where students are challenged to acknowledge the feelings associated with the exercise.
Students acknowledged that their creativity had been stifled due to an immersion in their degree program and that this activity helped them to remember that they were creative problem solvers.
“This being my last year of college, I have realized that a lot of the time you are conditioned to overanalyze, memorize for exams and get good grades but this showed me that sometimes you really do need to go back to the most basic, innocent way of thinking. While this was fun, it did have a powerful impact on me and I have already started using this way of thinking in, and outside of school situations.”
A small number of students, specifically older students, reported feelings of discomfort such as “I felt very silly. I just don’t like to be silly in class.” It is imperative that students are made to feel comfortable in the classroom environment when taking part in the exercise and in sharing their personal experiences.
You should reassure students that the classroom is a safe environment and photographs must only be taken with permission.
Further support should be given to these students in attempting to let go of their inhibitions and this is addressed if the educator can immerse themselves in the activity by dressing up which alleviates the discomfort of those students.
The more you can help your students feel safe, by being embodying the principles of the exercise yourself – creativity, self-expression, childishness – the more your students will be able to re-discover their hidden creativity.
Complete details to bring this exercise to life in your class, including all the instructions for you, are in the lesson plan below.
Get the “Embodying the Superhero” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Embodying the Superhero” exercise to walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.
A big thanks to Dr. Fleck for creating and sharing this exercise! For more information about Dr. Fleck and the amazing work she’s doing at Susquehanna University, click here.
Dr. Fleck is also one of the professors who piloted our forthcoming Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC). Her insights and feedback have been some of the most formative we have received. We strongly encourage anyone who gets the chance to collaborate with Dr. Fleck, to jump at the chance.
Get More Exercises
For more in our continuing series of free classroom resources, subscribe below.
Are you going to the USASBE conference in January? If so, we’ll see you there!
Friday Night Party
Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first, we’re throwing a party Friday night after the conference, and we’ve got room for 100 USASBE Conference attendees to join us.
We’ll also be leading a handful of sessions during the conference:
Teaching Without A Textbook (Thur. @ 1 pm) – A half-day workshop on Thursday demonstrating four real-world experiential exercises you can use to teach problem validation and the entrepreneurial mindset.
Demoing Interviews & MVPs (Fri. @ 9:15 am) – Learn how to demo a live customer interview to your students, and use that interview to build an MVP before your students’ eyes.
3 Steps to Better Idea Generation (Sat. @ 1:15 pm)- Three exercises that will help your students generate better business ideas by helping them focus less on products, and more on problems.
…is a finalist for the “USASBE Excellence in Pedagogical Innovation Award!“
We’ll be talking about how ExEC’s, “Show. Don’t Tell.” approach to experiential learning has been having a positive impact across 20 universities during it’s pilot phase…and we’re just getting started!
Come cheer us on at 1:45 pm on Friday in Salon 5 at the Excellence in Pedagogical Innovation Award!
If you haven’t already run the 60 Minute MVP exercise in your class this term, now is the time. It’s the most popular exercise on our blog – over 500 students having done it this month alone.
As Thomas Nelson, one of our new Experiential Curriculum (ExEC) pilot professors from the University of South Alabama, told us after running this exercise:
“One student described it as like a Navy Seal mental training exercise. Not sure it was that intense, but they were amazed and proud that they got it done.”
In just 60 minutes, your students will…
Design Landing Pages
Your students will build a website that describes the problem they’re solving, like this one Thomas’ students built:
Here’s one from Emma Fleck’s class at Susquehanna University, another of our pilot professors:
Create Explainer Videos
Your students will build an explainer video to show how their solution solves that problem, like this one from Thomas’ class:
Your students will build a currency test to validate demand for their product, like this:
Teach your students this critical entrepreneurship lesson:
We’ve documented all of the instructions your students need to follow in the lesson plan below.
You want to do this exercise in your class. Your students need you to do this exercise in your class.
Complete details to bring this exercise to life in your class, including all the instructions for you, and videos for your students are in the lesson plan below.
Get the “60 Minute MVP” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “60 Minute MVP” exercise walk you, and your students through the process, step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it.
Reminder: Learn From Professors Who Teach Without a Textbook
If you want to replace all your lectures with activities like the 60 Minute MVP, join us on Nov. 13th, to learn from four professors who have done just that, and to learn if the same will work in your class. They will tackle the most common problems, like:
How do you grade/assess my students without a textbook?
How do you engage students who aren’t into entrepreneurship?
How do you set student expectations when they’re used to traditional classes?
Textbooks and lectures are the antithesis to an engaging entrepreneurship classroom. You already know…
The entrepreneurship mindset is best developed through experience.
In fact, you’ve probably already incorporated a number of experiences into your course, and noticed how your students are more engaged than when you lecture.
Which begs the question…
What if you replaced all your lectures with activities?
James Sprenger, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology
Jennifer Daniels, Georgia State University
Mike Dominik, Rowan University
The benefits from making the switch have been eye-opening:
“I LOVE [Who Are Early Adopters?] exercise!!! So many times, I have had conversations with my students who are going to interview their dad, friend, someone who works in the industry and this exercise really takes the time to dispel this myth that these are important.” – Jennifer Daniels
“One student described [60 Minute MVP] as a Navy Seal mental training exercise. Not sure it was that intense, but they were amazed and proud that they got it done.” – Thomas Nelson
“Given the previous exercises students were able to quickly identify the interview channels that their early adopters might use. Students felt very confident about getting out and learning about the problem.” – Emma Fleck
At the same time, building a textbook-free course takes some consideration. If you’re interested in going experiential, these professors want to share details about their transition at:
A lot of questions will come up as you think replacing a textbook with experiential activities:
How much work will the transition be?
How will your students respond?
What are the downsides?
How will your administration respond?
At the Teaching Without a Textbook webinar, panelists will answer all of those questions, as well as any additional questions you have about their experience:
What’s the hardest part about teaching without a textbook?
What do they wish they would have known before ditching their textbook?
Many of you know me (Doan) from USASBE or my blog, or my research, but you may not know Justin Wilcox, the passionate entrepreneur driving TeachingEntrepreneurship.org. With this post, we pull back the curtain and introduce our wizard!
2014: Talks turned into workshops with accelerator programs (e.g. Google for Entrepreneurs, Techstars, Startup Weekend, etc.), and Fortune 500s
2015: Workshops turned into the FOCUS Framework and the “How to Find Product-Market Fit” workbook series
2017: The FOCUS Framework inspired our ExEC curriculum
Let’s Dive Deeper . . .
Justin and I did a one-on-one interview so you could hear his perspective in depth.
Or if you prefer, here’s a summary of our conversation:
How did Justin come to build curriculum for university professors?
As mentioned above, Justin started a healthcare software company, but realized that he built a product nobody wanted to use. He studied what went wrong in his entrepreneurial journey, eventually finding Steve Blank’s Customer Development model, one of the precursors to The Lean Startup.
It was then that Justin realized,
He hadn’t learned how to empathize.
While he learned how to write code in school, and build innovative products at Microsoft, innovation was meaningless if it didn’t lead to impact. To create impact, he had to learn how to see the world from his customer’s perspective – to feel what they felt. To become a better innovator, he had to become a better empathizer.
At the time Justin discovered Customer Development and Lean Startup, they were largely theoretical concepts with little practical guidance on how to apply them. So Justin started developing, documenting, and teaching, ways to practice integrating empathy into the entrepreneurial process.
After helping thousands of individual entrepreneurs do just that, university professors began reaching out asking Justin for help teaching these methodologies in the classroom. That’s when it became clear:
Professors faced the same challenges turning Lean Startup theory into action that he had.
Having discovered effective ways to teach the techniques, Justin reached out to me and we began collaborating on ways to teach them to entrepreneurship professors – which is when TeachingEntrepreneurship.org was born. 🙂
Why work with academics instead of entrepreneurs?
The big draw for working with academics is the impact multiplier we enable. By collaborating with professors, Justin learned he could have a larger impact because we as professors work with hundreds of thousands of students every year.
By helping us teach our students how to understand other people’s perspectives (empathy) and how to sustainably solve their problems (via business model validation), our combined impact can be much larger than if Justin worked solely with entrepreneurs.
Our whole is greater than the sum of our parts.
Where would he like to see entrepreneurship education go?
Justin practices what he preaches, and he’s heartened by professors who act the same way.
He wants to support teachers who apply the lean principles they teach, so they can optimize their impact. To that end, Justin is most excited by professors who treat their class like a startup:
Creating hypotheses about their course,
Running experiments to optimize the course,
Measuring their impact with metrics.
Justin wants to see more professors treat students like their customers and engage with them to build better courses.
These principles work. The more we apply them, the better we can teach them.
We’ve implemented a system for students to give us emotionally-driven feedback on every exercise.
Students tell us, and their professors, how they feel about each exercise.
The insight from this is super exciting for both of us. The aggregated feedback helps us know how students feel about their course, so together we can iterate and improve them.
Student feedback from ExEC’s Business Model Canvas intro exercise
Looking forward, what is most exciting is our ability to turn that data into engagement analytics so professors know in real time exactly how their students are feeling, and how exactly they are engaging with the material.
What’s the next step with ExEC?
Justin is busy updating much of the underlying technology for a streamlined experience for professors and students.
We are keeping our Spring cohort fairly small;there are only about five spots still available.
If you’re eager to use an experiential approach, can provide us feedback on a regular basis, and can ask your students to provide us feedback on a regular basis…
Then you’re a perfect candidate to be an ExEC Pilot, and you can shape the way entrepreneurship is taught.
Bonus Question
If you’ve read this far – thank you – you deserve a little extra. What’s one thing that very few people know about Justin?
Want to work with Justin and I to change Entrepreneurship?
If you’re a progressive entrepreneurship professor interested in getting your hands dirty in the name of improving entrepreneurship education join us and you can play a significant role in reshaping how entrepreneurship is taught at colleges around the world.
Stay Tuned
For more updates on ExEC, and our continuing series of free classroom resources delivered to your inbox, subscribe below.
We love creating and sharing resources to make classrooms more engaging. We are not alone in that passion. This week, it is our pleasure to collaborate with a kindred spirit, both in terms of teaching experientially, and in sharing resources to help others do the same.
In her post, copied below, Dr. Robb shares her journey of turning her syllabus into an infographic so students would read and remember it.
Click to view Dr. Robb’s full syllabus infographic.
I know, we’ve all been there. It’s the end of the semester and students suddenly realize your late work policy, your attendance policy or your quality work policy. I’ve actually talked to students about this and they cite reasons such as:
It’s just like every other syllabus they’ve read
It’s too long
It doesn’t apply to me
I never really look at it until I have a bad grade
Like it or not, our students these days are just as distracted as we are. They simply do not take the time to read the syllabus. So, this term, I thought about why that might be.
It turns out, I am just as guilty as they are. I don’t thoroughly review the credit terms on my credit cards or the terms of agreement when I buy a song from Apple. Why should I? They all read the same. It’s blah, blah, blah.
Well, this term, I decided to up my game and get my syllabus up with the times. I created an Infographic version of my syllabus. I actually decided to upload that image directly to Blackboard so it is the first thing students see.
Piktochart also offers a “Presentation Mode” for your infographic
I made a list of all the things students seemed to forget about my class (attendance policy, plagiarism policy, late work policy). I then took all of these frustrations and put them in beautiful, colorful visuals so they would actually look at them.
Piktochart is a free site that allows you to create professional looking infographics for any purpose. I made an infographic for my Introduction to Entrepreneurship course so the students understand where the course will lead them. It has been the most successful by far. You can see the full infographic here.
Whether this visual tool is used for a class project or an overall class syllabus, the students’ response has been tremendous. For the first time, I’ve had students send me emails that they are aware of the class policies!
Create your Syllabus with your Students
What appealed to us so much was not just the creativity of Dr. Robb’s approach, but that it very quickly and easily allowed students to understand the structure of her entire course. We love that she saw her syllabus as an opportunity to try something different to better engage her students.
As we’ve talked about in a previous post, your syllabus presents a unique opportunity to listen to your students’ problems and to turn those into a plan of attack together. Co-creating your syllabus with your students is an effective way to begin your semester because many students don’t think entrepreneurship will be relevant to them in their career.
Through this co-creation process, you can understand the problems that are most salient to your students, and then weave those into the syllabus, so they understand which weeks you’ll be solving problems most relevant to them.
Your syllabus is not just a contract between you and your students. It is not just a bunch of words. As Dr. Robb suggests, it can come alive and be a model of how you want your students to think and to act. We so enjoyed learning about Dr. Robb’s approach that we dove into combining her approach of creating an infographic with our approach of co-creating a syllabus.
Here’s a quick video extrapolating how these two approaches combine to create an even more powerful approach to engaging your students from day one.
Co-Create your Syllabus Lesson Plan
We’ve created an experiential, 45-minute lesson plan to help you co-create your entrepreneurship syllabus with your students. It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers. Please feel free to share it. All we ask is that you leave us some feedback on it so we can improve it!
And don’t forget to check out Dr. Robb’s blog for more resources and guidance on making your classroom experience more engaging!
What are you Working On?
If you’re working on an innovative way to impact students in your class and want to share with the 1,500 members of TeachingEntrepreneurship.org, let us know. This is an experimental collaboration, and if it works out, we may do more like it!
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ExEC is an experiment to see if we can revolutionize how entrepreneurship is taught in college classrooms.
Halfway through our first pilot semester, we wanted to share the results so far – warts and all – so the entrepreneurship education community at large can learn along with us.
The Numbers
We’re grateful to have 10 schools across the United States and Canada piloting with us this Fall:
Rowan University
Brandon University
East Carolina University
Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT)
University of South Alabama
Gulf Coast State College
Xavier University
John Carroll University
Susquehanna University
Georgia State University
Across these institutions, we have nearly 500 undergraduate students using the curriculum.
Just as ExEC challenges those 500 students to do, we’re testing the curriculum’s assumptions and iterating its design. Here’s what we’ve found so far.
The Good
Our pilot professors and students have told us ExEC stands out with respect to other curricula in a couple areas:
Developing the Entrepreneurial Mindset
We want students engaging with their customers, discovering problems that can be solved instead of just thinking of new ideas to create.
One professor told us:
“More than anything, I’ve enjoyed that we have spent 4-5 weeks exploring the issue of problem solving. In previous classes, students have been convinced they had the right solution to a problem by week 2 and no matter what research they found, they wouldn’t pivot appropriately given the new evidence.”
Students are also sharing their excitement at better understanding how entrepreneurs think. One student said:
“This activity made me look at the creation of a product in a different aspect than I have before. It allowed me to think of solving a problem and not just creating a product to create one. It needs to be something that people will actually use. It made it easier for me to be creative and think more like an entrepreneur.”
Another student told us:
“The exercise was a very clear, somewhat concise explanation of the mindset needed for successful entrepreneurship. It shows the clear relationship between successful startups and outlines the key consistencies for success.”
And perhaps our favorite student feedback:
“[The Business Plans vs. Business Experiments exercise] made me think like a kindergartener again and that made me excited.”
Replacing Lectures with Experiences
ExEC provides professors with comprehensive lesson plans, and constant support, so you can create experiences like this that will excite students about experiencing entrepreneurship.
One of the exercises uses marshmallows to teach students about the danger of hidden assumptions, and why business plans lead to failure more often than not:
Pilot students have been sharing their excitement with the exercises as well. They are seeing how they can apply what they are experiencing in class:
“This really showed me what it takes to develop an idea. Also helped me get more in touch with who I’m trying to target with my idea and how it can help [him/her].”
“I can use the [exercise] for all business ideas that come to mind and when analyzing other companies.”
Students have shared how the exercises have shifted their thinking:
“I feel I will perform better in the future when completing a project because now I know the value of prototyping, also, now I understand the importance of identifying the hidden assumptions which cause many times good ideas to fail.”
“Knowing how feelings play a part in buying and decision making is interesting and will help with my business model. I did not really think or relate the two before this class.”
“This provides a clear understanding of what it takes to solve a problem and come up with ideas to solve those problems. It showed me some key resources that I did not know before to help start a company through problem solving.”
Getting Students Interviewing Customers
We want students having real conversations with real customers about the customer’s problems. This is the essence of entrepreneurship, and a skill we heard most professors struggle teaching.
One professor told us:
“Given the previous exercises on identifying the early adopters and clarifying the problem statement, [The How To Ask for Interviews exercise] was a very positive exercise. Students were able to quickly identify the interview channels that their early adopters might use (social media, blogs, interviews) and plan how to initiate that conversation using the strategy outlined in this exercise. By the end of today, the students felt very confident about getting out and learning about the problem.”
Our interviewing exercises push students to think about learning from actual customers, instead of industry or product “experts”, as shared by one professor:
“I LOVE [Who Are Early Adopters?] exercise!!!So many times, I have had conversations with my students who are going to interview their dad, friend, someone who works in the industry and this exercise really takes the time to dispel this myth that these are important.”
The students are also realizing how powerful interviews are, especially in comparison to surveys, thanks to an ExEC exercise that makes them survey and interview customers, and compare the results:
“The [Student Challenges Survey exercise] is showing how surveys do not capture the full picture from a consumer whereas an interview lets the customer give more feedback.”
After half a semester, we are confident the pilot students are engaged in their class experience. Through that engagement, we see them developing an entrepreneurial mindset, and honing their customer interviewing skills.
The Bad
We preach iteration because there’s no way to get everything right the first time around – and that’s the case with ExEC. Here are a couple areas we need to focus on going forward.
Less is More
We created too much content. We originally wanted to arm our professors with more experiences and exercises than they could ever use, so they could build a customized syllabus specifically for their class.
That strategy has started to backfire as some professors have, understandably, began feeling pressured to cover a lot of material in a limited amount of time. One told us:
“I was extremely nervous . . . to teach a class that had so many new components that I was learning day by day.”
Another shared:
“I think there are too many lessons on interviewing, although I see its utility.”
ExEC has 30+ experiential exercises, which is simply too many for one semester, especially when life readjusts the class schedule, as it did with Hurricane Irma for a couple professors.
The Fix
Based on the exercises students find most impactful, we’re streamlining ExEC’s content to focus on a subset of activities.
Restricting Access
We were so excited to share ExEC with as many schools as possible, we initially weren’t as rigorous as we should have been in restricting access.
ExEC has a lot of moving parts, several of them untested before this semester. We should have started with a slightly smaller, more targeted, pilot cohort so we could iron out ExEC’s wrinkles (details below) more efficiently.
The Fix
Having been through trial by fire this semester, we think we have a handle on the major issues. That said, we’ll be limiting access to our upcoming Spring Pilot, just to err on the side of caution.
The Ugly
There is one area we really missed the mark this semester. Because of it, we’ve already started the redesign process.
Poor Design Choices
We made some incorrect assumptions about the technical comfort of some of our students and professors – which really means we made poor design choices on our end.
Our pilot professors and their students are less familiar with technology than we anticipated. We expected more feedback like this from one professor:
“I have taken one class at a time, one new element at a time and really enjoyed exploring the new materials.”
But one professor told us:
“I like to think I’m not stupid, but working through this to get it ready for my students makes me question that.”
And one student told us:
“I’m absolutely thrilled that [I] bought a program coded by a team of incompetents.”
While our professors certainly aren’t stupid, and we (hope we) aren’t incompetent, any experience that makes even a subset of customers feel that way needs to fixed immediately.
The Fix
We’ve already begun making to several exercises, but there’s more work to do.
We’ve started redesigning both the professor and student experiences from the ground-up; while the content will largely remain the same going forward, the way professors and students interact with it will be completely revamped.
Takeaways
So far, this has been a perfect pilot!
Not perfect in that we got everything right – we certainly haven’t – perfect in the sense that this is what pilots are for. With the help of our amazing pilot professors, we’ve been living the Build, Measure, Learn loop.
We’re really excited about ExEC’s and while we haven’t gotten everything right so far, we’ve made some great progress on some of the hardest parts:
Developing the entrepreneurial mindset
Replacing lectures with experiences
Getting students interviewing customers
Next up, we’ll polish our rough design edges so everyone feels confident engaging with the content!
Want to Shape Entrepreneurship?
As mentioned above, we’ll be limiting access to the Spring Pilot, but if you’re a progressive entrepreneurship professor willing to get your hands dirty in the name of improving entrepreneurship education…
We’ll accept a handful of programs into the Spring Pilot, which will not only get you early access, as you can see, you’ll also play a significant role in reshaping how entrepreneurship is taught at colleges around the world.
Stay Tuned
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