Last week we discussed the challenges of AI in academia. This week, we’re exploring the benefits of it, with a new lesson plan! In this exercise, your students will explore…
Who is a better cofounder: a human, or ChatGPT?
In this lesson you’ll simultaneously:
Demonstrate some of the amazing capabilities of ChatGPT to your students
You’ll also give them an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the business model validation process
This is a powerful exercise to wrap up your term, in particular as a final project or exam.
Watch the video below for a demo:
My ChatGPT Cofounder Demo
Get the “My ChatGPT Cofounder” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “My ChatGPT Cofounder” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
Many of us are concerned about the impact of ChatGPT and other AI tools on academic integrity.
How are we going to combat ChatGPT and other AI tools in our classrooms?
The major concern is that more and more students use ChatGPT to complete writing assignments.
Detecting AI writing with enough evidence to act will be a major challenge. As AI tools evolve, so do detection tools, but the detecting tools face higher expectations than those that create AI text, making it doubtful they’ll ever catch up.
Concerns about students shortcutting assignments using AI are very valid, and require creative restructuring of assignments.
While there’s no silver bullet to solve the problems AI-generated text pose, there are tools available to combat ChatGPT use in the classroom.
Let’s look at a few.
Tools to Detect AI Use in Writing Assignments
Here’s a video demonstrating how 3 popular AI detection tools work, and strategies that motivated students can use to defeat them.
GPTZero detects two different factors in AI-generated text:
Perplexity, which measures how likely each word is suggested by AI; a human would be more random.
Burstiness, which compares sentence length and complexity variation and measures the spikes in the perplexity of each sentence. AI-generated text will have a similar degree of perplexity from sentence to sentence, but a human is likely to write with spikes.
Upload text or multiple files at once, and the tool provides a holistic score for how much of the writing is written by AI and also highlights each sentence written by AI, as illustrated below.
Another detection tool is AI Text Classifier, developed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.You must enter at least 1,000 characters for this tool to analyze.
This tool provides a simple suggestion that it considers the text is definitely, possibly, very unlikely, or extremely unlikely AI-generated, but no more depth than that.
Writer AI Content Detector is another AI-generated content detection tool you can use. Paste up to 1,500 characters, and it provides a percentage confidence that the text is human-generated.
As you can see from the video above, these detection tools don’t work very well. A better approach to combat AI in the classroom is reimagining how to structure assignments.
Better Strategies to Avoid AI Plagiarism
The best way to prevent students from relying on AI to produce their assignments requires elements that only humans can fulfill. Here are a few strategies to incorporate those elements:
Have students submit multiple drafts of assignments, with explanations of any changes. This way, you can examine their progress so they can’t simply copy and paste the final assignment
Create plagiarism-resistant assignments by focusing on process rather than product. Scaffold the learning by asking students to explain their thinking through in-class discussion, and then ask them to capture their reasoning in their written reflections.
Grade more in-class assignments, such as short presentations.
Make assignments personal. You can require students to apply the topic to their experience, or have them justify their opinion/outcome by citing personal experiences that informed them.
Using AI for Good in the Classroom
Of course, AI isn’t all bad. In fact, when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship, it can be incredibly powerful. In our next post, we’ll show you the benefits of AI including how to:
Teach your students about AI and
Show them how it can help them quickly come up with new business models and experiments to test those business models
Subscribe here to get the next post delivered in your inbox.
Students’ eyes glaze over when they read the syllabus.
How we can engage students and start teaching them entrepreneurship skills from the moment they walk into our classes?
Jay Markiewicz from Virginia Commonwealth University developed a novel way to start your semester that almost guarantees students will WANT to come back!
Step 1: Problem Definition and Customer Discovery
It’s the first day of class. We want to be anti-boring.
We want to put students in the middle of an engaging experience right away.
And even better, we want the engagement to be instructive.
By asking the question below, the moment is instantly relevant because students are experiencing it in real-time. Students begin by using Post-it notes to answer this question
What are the challenges and concerns students face on day one of a new course?
Students then text their friends that same question, write down their friends’ responses on post-it notes, and mark them as ‘friends said.’
Within minutes, students are practicing customer discovery!
In small teams of 3-4, students take a moment to meet each other and then collaborate by discussing with each other the challenges/concerns they wrote on their post-it notes.
In this step, students start identifying problems, and progress into customer discovery, all within a matter of minutes!
Step 2: Data Analysis
In this step, teams use their post-it notes to group similar answers, ranking their top concerns/challenges.
Each team writes their top 2-3 answers on the board to start a list of all of the concerns/challenges students identified.
You can now engage the class in a discussion on the priority “problems” that students have on day one.
Here are some example answers you may see as the top priority”
“Getting to know each other. Avoiding day one awkwardness.”
“Getting interested in the course. Knowing what I’ll be learning throughout the course.”
In this step, students start analyzing customer discovery data – and you’re not even halfway through your first class!
Step 3: Solution Generation
Now we engage students even deeper, and have a little fun along the way!
They practiced problem definition, customer discovery, and data analysis. The next skill is generating solutions to the problem they just identified.
Ask students to write answers on the post-it notes to the following question:
If you were me, what solutions would you design for these problems?
Students don’t need to text friends this time. Instead, have them form NEW teams of 3-4 students and go through the same steps as above – meet each other, identify the most common solutions, then debrief with answers grouped on the board or wall.
Step 4: Reflection
The last step of this amazing kickoff experience, included in the lesson plan below, are to have students reflect and then to implement solutions.
This is where the lesson goes from good to great as you ask your student to analyze the process they’ve gone through on the first day of class, and the “ah-ha!” moments begin.
Click below to….
Get the Full “What is Your F Problem?” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “What is Your F Problem?” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
With so many tools out there to teach entrepreneurship . . .
Do you want to know which tools other instructors are using, and why?
We’re sending this survey to our community of 12,000+ entrepreneurship educators to discover which teaching tools are the most popular.
And so that all of us benefit, we’ll be sharing the results of the survey with anyone who completes it.
So if you’d like to know which teaching tools are most popular for entrepreneurship education, just answer these very quick questions (~3 min) and we’ll share what we discover with you.
In upcoming posts, we will share lesson plans, slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these 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:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2022 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2022 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
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.
Many of our students don’t see themselves mirrored in the entrepreneurship videos, guests, and case studies we use.
What if we created a set of resources and best practices to show ALL our students who they can become?
If you’d like to help create, and have access to, a set of entrepreneurial examples and success stories that highlight under-represented groups, please click the button below.
In upcoming posts, we will share lesson plans, slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these 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:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
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.
Below you’ll find the slides, lesson plans, and where available, recordings from our presentations.
But first, we wanted to say thank you for such a fantastic conference and share some of our highlights:
HAPPY HOUR MILKSHAKES
MEETING SUMMIT FACILITATORS (IN REAL LIFE)
Twice a year we host the Teaching Entrepreneurship Summit showcasing the best entrepreneurship exercises we can find, and we couldn’t do it without an outstanding cohort of facilitators.
This award gives special recognition to the people whose outstanding passion for entrepreneurship is reflected in their teaching, writing, research, training, and public service.
Doan is one of only 85 people to be selected as a Longenecker Fellow over the last 36 years and we can’t thank him enough for his contribution to entrepreneurship education.
MAKING THE 3E PODIUM
This year’s exercises were the best we’d ever seen at USASBE.
Considering the level of competition among the Entrepreneurship Experiential Exercises (3E), we were ecstatic, and honored, that the Financial Modeling Showdown got recognized!
FEDERICO BOWLING FOR THE FIRST TIME
That face says it all 🙂
Overall, we came away from the conference reinvigorated and recommitted to providing the best entrepreneurship education resources we can!
Speaking of which, here are all of our resources from USASBE:
SLIDES, LESSON PLANS, AND RECORDINGS
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Get Slides, Lesson Plans, and Exercises
Marketing MVPs: Testing Demand on Social Media (Justin Wilcox)
Has a guest speaker ever said something to your class you had already taught, but your students seemed to believe it more from them?
It’s not because students don’t listen. It’s because when an outsider reinforces something we say, it feels more important.
This is one of the reasons guest speakers are great, but they can be hard to schedule for every lesson. So for any lesson you really want to drive home, you can try using a video as a validating external voice.
Here are some videos of Steve Jobs that you can use in conjunction with lessons on growth mindset, marketing, and pricing:
“If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”
This is a fantastic video to reinforce the Failure Resume lesson. This exercise is a favorite among students and helps them develop growth mindset skills, especially when they’re endorsed by someone like Steve Jobs.
This video, where Steve talks about why the best ads barely talk about the product at all, is a great compliment to the Lottery Ticket Dilemma. This lesson helps students understand the persuasive power of emotions and was the winner of USASBE’s 3E competition.
This video is an amazing example of Steve’s reality distortion field. Your students can see him convince a crowd that the iPad (a larger but less capable iPhone) was a steal at 250% the price of an iPhone because…it’s more like a laptop than a phone?!
You can use this video in conjunction with the Financial Modeling Showdown to demonstrate that the optimal price of a product isn’t determined by its cost of goods sold, it’s determined by what customers are willing to pay for it.
The Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit provides you with top-performing exercises and lets you experience these exercises like your students will. Plus, they’re…
Free when you join us live!
Both sessions will run from 1:00 – 2:30 pm Eastern on their respective days but if you can’t join us live, recordings are available for purchase.
Tuesday, December 13th
See It Taught Live: Financial Modeling Showdown
Watch Dr. Doan Winkel teach his students financial modeling live* using a fun, interactive game that you can use with your students too!
*We’ll live stream cameras from the classroom so you’ll literally see how the lesson is taught.
Tuesday, December 20th
Engagement From the First Day
Use this lesson to get your students to think like entrepreneurs from the first day of class.
In collaboration with Jay Markiewicz from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Customer interviews make students anxious because they fear approaching strangers.
It’s our job to build their customer interviewing muscle.
Like the Make Entrepreneurship Relevant Slides, you can use these slides to get your students excited about interviewing customers. If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
CRAWL: Learn What To Ask
In your first class on customer interviews, consider using a lesson like the Customer Interviewing Cards to help your students learn:
What questions they should ask
What questions they shouldn’t ask
And, most importantly, why
Once your students have a good sense of what to ask during an interview, they’re ready to . . .
WALK: Interview Classmates
Students should get comfortable interviewing in a low-stakes environment, so have them start by interviewing 2 – 3 of their classmates.
It’s common for students to feel awkward conducting their first interviews. Let them know the awkwardness is normal and that’s why you’re giving them the opportunity to practice. Reassure your students that the more interviews they do, the more comfortable they’ll feel.
Bonus: Having students interview each other means each student gets interviewed as well.
When students get interviewed, they experience how validating it is to have someone listen to their problems.
When students realize that it feels good to be interviewed, they discover they won’t be bothering their interviewees. That insight alone can reduce their anxiety.
Note: The goal of classmate interviews is just to practice interviewing – they shouldn’t be used for real business model validation. Have your students start their classmate interviews off with, “What’s the biggest challenge you have as a student?” and then let the interview flow from there.
Click below to learn how your students can RUN and FLY with their customer interviews!
RUN: Interview Family and Friends
After interviewing a couple of classmates, students are ready to try interviewing friends and family members. This step gives students a safe way to practice interviewing people who, like their customers, will have no idea what a customer interview is.
As homework, ask your students to interview 3 friends or family members for at least 30 minutes each. Their goal is to learn as much as they can about the problems their interviewees have encountered in the last week (i.e., “What have been the biggest challenges that have come up for you over the last week?”).
As with the classmate interviews, the friends and family interviews shouldn’t be related to the product/service the students ultimately want to launch. These are just practice interviews in preparation for . . .
FLY: Interview Customers
Your students are now ready for real customer interviews!
You’ll want to make your students know the right customers to ask for interviews, and how to ask for those interviews, but at this point, your students will have much less anxiety about interviewing customers.
Since we started implementing this progression with our students, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our students’ interviewing confidence and the quality of their interviews:
“At the beginning, I was really nervous about interviewing but after getting feedback from my friends and family it’s, surprisingly, become my favorite part of the class!”
– ExEC Student
If you’d like any more help teaching customer interviews, including:
In upcoming posts, we will share more slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these 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:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
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.
If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
