Last summer we had a blast launching our new “Pilot Your Purpose” and “Skills Scavenger Hunt” exercises and sharing best practices with 1,350+ entrepreneurship teachers like you at the
Dec. 9th How to Build an App (without writing code)
So many of our students want to launch apps but don’t think they have the skills. On Dec. 9th, that will change.
Join us to learn how your students can create their own apps, by creating one yourself, without writing a single line of code!
Plus, meet and share best practices for prototyping and MVPs with other entrepreneurship instructors from around the world.
Dec. 16th Entrepreneurial Plinko:
Why Business Plans Don’t Work
This new game will teach your students why business plans are falling out of favor and being replaced by:
Business Models
Customer Interviews
Design Thinking and
MVPs
Combining Plinko with Tinder, this game will demonstrate why we don’t emphasize business plans anymore while getting students excited about running business model experiments instead!
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:
Less Time = More Engagement. Teaching entrepreneurship online to engage students is hard. Use the “best entrepreneurship curriculum available” to WOW! your students this Spring and spend less time preparing and more time engaging.
Gamify Your Online Class. Don’t lecture at your students. Invite them into a game to learn the material. If you gamify your online class sessions, your students engage and perform!
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.
It doesn’t support animations in your slides. If you have animations you want to keep, there’s a tool called PPspliT that may help you split each of your animations into separate static slides.
Easiest Solution if You Use a Mac
If Zoom’s slide virtual backgrounds won’t do the trick for you and you’re on a Mac, the next easiest option is to use the new mmhmm app.
Similar to the solution for Zoom users outlined above, mmhmm allows you to show content “over your shoulder” and dive into an immersive full-screen presentation. Like the Zoom setup above, this experience engages your students in an interactive experience.
Mmhmm integrates with Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, and a few others.
Recent updates now allow for full compatibility with any video app that allows screen sharing!
Setting Up mmhmm
Step 1: Open the app
Step 2: If you use a green screen, click the Camera button in the top right corner, and click the I have a green screen box. If you don’t have a green screen, use the Presenter sidebar and experiment with the Silhouette, Round and Portrait mask tools to frame yourself. With mmhmm, you can use the resizer to shrink and grow yourself and your images to direct your viewers’ attention exactly where you want it to be.
Step 3: Click the Rooms sidebar to choose your background image. You can choose from the always-growing variety included, or you can upload your own image or video to use as a background.
Step 4: Add your slides in the Slide Tray at the bottom of the mmhmm screen.
Step 5: Once you have your slides and camera set up, share your screen in your respective platform (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.) and choose the mmhmm tab to present your interactive, engaging presentation. With new features shipping all the time, mmhmm continues to offer ways to WOW! your students. For instance, they recently released the Copilot feature, so now two people can work together on the same presentation.
As with the Zoom solution outlined earlier, mmhmm is not a perfect solution. This app is currently in beta functionality, meaning mmhmm is actively working on it so there might be bugs and some rough edges to the experience.
Additionally, this app is only for Mac users – while they promise a Windows version is on the way soon, it does not currently exist.
Easiest Universal Solution
While a little more involved, Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is the original and most powerful way to combine your slides and webcam.
OBS works on Windows and Mac, and with virtually all web conference software tools.
Fortunately, the process of using OBS to achieve this effect has been greatly simplified.
Click here for our easier instructions for using OBS to create engaging presentations.
See It In Action
We hope you give this technique a shot – it helps students stay engaged and it’s a more fun way to lecture.
To see a recorded online session that uses these techniques to combine webcam and slides, add your email:
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Less Time = More Engagement. Teaching entrepreneurship online to engage students is hard. Use the “best entrepreneurship curriculum available” to WOW! your students this Spring and spend less time preparing and more time engaging.
Gamify Your Online Class. Don’t lecture at your students. Invite them into a game to learn the material. If you gamify your online class sessions, your students engage and perform!
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.
…and the whole thing takes more of your time to manage.
This spring, if you want to save time while engaging your students online, use “the best entrepreneurship curriculum available” – 15 weeks of structured, cohesive, interactive lessons that will engage your students.
Increase Student Engagement
ExEC is an experience, for both our professors and students. Instead of you having to talk at students, the exercises invite your students to learn by doing, so they engage themselves. For example, you can…
Engage Students in Ideation
In many entrepreneurship courses, students brainstorm ideas to work on based on a Bug List or some other sort of brainstorming exercise. These exercises don’t take advantage of students’ passions and can fail to engage them.
Ideation in ExEC starts with brainstorming their ideal customers. Your students start by understanding the emotional needs of people they are attached to (i.e. people they are passionate about helping). Those needs become the foundation of their business ideas, ensuring students are motivated throughout your course.
Example Idea Generation
We know customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions to problems – and right now people’s problems have changed dramatically. The idea generation exercises within ExEC will your students how to identify new opportunities they’re excited about that are inspired by real-world problems.
Engage in Interviews Done Right
Entrepreneurship students must learn how to effectively talk to customers to discover and validate their problems. ExEC uses a three-step experiential process to engage students in this skill. First, students play a competitive game to learn what questions they should and should not ask.
When you run this exercise, your students will be immersed as they eagerly sort cards into different piles and compete with one another using their phones to see who can correctly answer the most questions, the fastest.
The second step is for students to practice their interview skills with their classmates. ExEC provides students with a robust interview script, which they’ll practice multiple times with their peers so they can feel more comfortable for step #3 – interviewing real customers.
Finally, for the third step, your students will students interview customers the right way, at which point…
The learning becomes real!
Give your students a structured framework to conduct their interviews increases their confidence and, as a result, ensures they don’t disengage when you ask them to step out of their comfort zone.
Make Hybrid Easier
For better or worse, hybrid teaching is the new normal. When you teach online or hybrid, with proper planning you can replicate the engagement of all the experiences you’d do in-person.
We built each class session, each activity, each homework assignment to bring our award-winning engagement into an online environment. With ExEC, you engage students through elements like:
Virtual Post-It note exercises with all students simultaneously
Class-wide discussions including everyone
Small-group breakouts
Using a structured set of lessons like the ones in ExEC enables you to have modular exercises you can integrate into your online or hybrid course to ensure your class is engaging.
Plus ExEC offers fully online and hybrid course packages for you on:
Canvas
Brightspace / D2L
Moodle
Blackboard
With the right curriculum and enough time to prepare, online learning can be better than in-person.
We will make your hybrid teaching easier.
If you’re teaching entrepreneurship online, you can have an engaging class without reinventing the wheel.
Keep Students Motivated
Students spend hours each day on Zoom listening to professors lecturing them. Then they spend hours each night on a computer completing homework and in group meetings. Zoom fatigue is a huge impediment to student engagement – our students have to make more emotional effort to appear interested, and the intense focus on sustained eye contact is exhausting.
Learning on Zoom isn’t fun. It isn’t exciting. Unless you can engage students with something like ExEC!
ExEC launches on day one with a super-engaging exercise called “Fear, Curiosity, and Toothbrushes”. Students interactively share their fears and curiosities about life after graduation. Professors map this information onto the syllabus to show students how the class will benefit them personally, in areas that matter to them.
The second part of this kickoff class is about normalizing failure, using the Toothbrush Design Challenge, which won the 2019 Excellence in Entrepreneurship Exercises Competition at the USASBE Annual Conference. Helping your students recognize the value of failed experiments now, early in the course, will help them make the most of the learning opportunities to follow immediately after this lesson.
The rest of the semester proceeds through a variety of high-energy experiences like the 60-Minute MVP, which one professor described 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.”
ExEC attacks topics students struggle with like finances with fun, game-like experiences like our Financial Projection Simulator.
From the first class session to the last class session, we keep you and your students excited and motivated
Make Spring Better
Spring can be more engaging and less stressful for your students. With a cohesive set of experiential:
Lesson plans
Sample slides
Student exercises
Rubrics
LMS templates
ExEC enables you to deliver an experience your students will never forget!
If Zoom fatigue is lowering enthusiasm for you and your students, here are some tips on using one simple tool – Slido – to inject energy into your online classes and increase online engagement.
Encourage Anonymous Questions
Slido is best known for helping instructors solicit questions from students and providing a mechanism for students to prioritize their most important questions.
A lesser-known element of Slido is that it allows your students to ask questions anonymously, and…
Anonymous questions increase interaction.
For example, if your high school health classes were anything like mine, the most interesting questions came when students anonymously wrote questions on pieces of paper and put them in a box to be answered by the teacher at the end of the week. Those questions started such provocative discussions I remember several of them today…decades later.
When you enable students to ask questions anonymously in your class, several interesting things happen:
Introverts participate. If you have a few vocal students asking questions and little participation from others, anonymous questions lower student anxiety, which makes it easier for everyone to participate.
You learn what students are thinking about. Anonymity provides cover for students to ask questions they may be too afraid to ask but are curious about.
Discussions start. Anonymity means you can invite students to pose “challenging” questions. If you encourage your students to question what they’re learning, why it’s important, or why they should have to do the work you’re assigning, you spark discussions about how entrepreneurship is relevant, which can often be the key to increasing engagement.
One great way to take advantage of this technique is to start each class session off by inviting students to post anonymous questions about the last lesson you did, their last homework assignment, or anything else on their mind. If you do this at the beginning of every lesson, students know there’s always a safe place for them to ask questions, and you’ll see more of them crop up throughout your term.
Crystalize Learnings
In addition to soliciting questions, Slido also solicits brainstormed ideas from students.
One interesting way to use this technique is to have students post their takeaways from a lesson or exercise.
Some takeaways from the 2020 TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Summer Virtual Conference
When you ask students to write down what they’ve learned from an exercise, the process of writing their takeaway helps cement their learning. Plus, when you ask other students to upvote other students’ takeaways, they get to see a summary of all the topics you covered during the lesson, you also get to see which were most salient (and what topics you may need to reinforce in another class).
Plus, it’s a fun interactive way to end a lesson. Speaking of fun interactions, Slido is also great for creating…
Quiz Games
As we wrote in the Gamify your Lectures post, Slido is also great for replacing boring slides, with interactive games.
Be sure to read our full write-up for details on easy ways to make presenting information more fun for students.
See it All in Action
Enter your email address below to see exactly how we use Slido with these techniques to teach our TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Online Virtual Conference attendees:
https://youtu.be/remG5jCjm9Y?t=4m53s
Summary
If you want to inject a little energy into your class, we’ve found one simple tool – Slido – enables you to:
Solicit anonymous, prioritized questions from your students
Brainstorm ideas with students, including their takeaways
Social distancing appears to be our best bet (source)
Given the devastating effects of the virus, and the likelihood of returning, It’s hard to see how it makes sense for schools to invite students back into dorms and classrooms in Fall.
Even if we’re able to start classes in-person, we’ll all need plans to quickly transition our class online if necessary.
So how do you prep a class hoping it’ll be in-person, but assuming it’ll be online while knowing that…
Engagement is Harder Online
Let’s not kid ourselves…
Student engagement was a challenge before COVID-19.
But now that students are taking classes from home (i.e. bed), can attend class while watching Netflix, and know that we can’t be in every breakout room simultaneously, it’s an even bigger challenge.
Fortunately, there’s a way to prep for fall that will…
Engage Your Students: Online or In-Person
Lecture and quiz-based classes won’t cut it (they’re the antithesis of engagement), and it’s near impossible to structure a rigorous online class if you’re mixing and matching exercises from around the web.
If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person and don’t want to spend all summer building it.
Consider trying ExEC this Fall.
We’ve been developing ExEC, the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum, for the last 5 years and so far it’s…
There are two versions of ExEC: one we’ve optimized for teaching in-person, and the other which we’ve optimized for teaching online and, especially relevant this Fall…
You can seamlessly transition between the two, even mid-term.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
We’ve spent years testing and improving a structured set of exercises that we know teach entrepreneurial skills in an engaging way – online or in-person.
Don’t spend your summer recording lectures or compiling exercises from around the web. Make the most of your break, and your Fall, by using a set of rigorous, cohesive lessons your students will engage with.
This Fall, Try ExEC…
Whatever path you take this Fall, we wish you and your students the very best, and are happy to offer any help we can.
If you’d like lesson plans email to you directly, subscribe here to get the next one in your inbox.
Teaching Entrepreneurship Online: 5 Common Mistakes (and how to Avoid Them)
As many of us transition our classes online, growing pains will abound. We wanted to provide a quick summary of the most common pitfalls you’re likely to run into so you know how to avoid them.
5 Online Teaching Mistakes to Avoid
Mistake #1: Weekly assignments
If you have weekly assignments, in other words just one touchpoint per week where students are expected to turn something in, you’re inviting time management challenges for your students. This can be especially true if students are new to taking online classes; they’re not used to planning out their weekly schedule around finishing assignments. Couple that with other work and class commitments and in all likelihood, they will wait until the last minute to get their work finished.
Solution: Multiple touch points each week.
When transitioning our own in-person curriculum online, we’ve found it helps set our students up for success by having at least 2 touchpoints per week. For example, we have assignments due on Tuesday and Thursday. Alternatively, you can set up your course so that assignments are due Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Whatever you decide, break up the assignments into smaller chunks to help avoid any time management problems your students may have. This will help keep them on track and reduce their tendency to cram.
Mistake #2: Not Using Groups
We often hear from professors who teach online that they don’t feel as connected to their students, or they worry their students don’t feel connected to them. Additionally, we’ve heard from students that they don’t feel connected to other students when taking an online class.
If you’re avoiding group work because you’re teaching online, you’re missing an effective tool for fostering a connection between your students.
Group work can seem daunting to set up, assess and grade online, but it doesn’t have to be. And since group work is a powerful tool to combat disconnection in an online classroom, it’s worth the effort. Here are a few of our proven methods for creating a successful group.
1) Reflection Groups
Reflection Groups are small groups of students (3-4), who meet up “face-to-face” online via Zoom, Skype, Facetime, etc. to reflect on individual experiences they’ve had during the class. This provides an explicit opportunity to reflect, and take notes about their reflections, with peers from the class, helps drive student thinking deeper. It also helps them connect with other people in their class and fosters a more profound connection since it provides space for them to share their reflections of their experience, rather than simply sharing right/wrong answers.
For example, in our classes students meet with their reflection groups to discuss:
Their fears and curiosities about life after graduation
The biggest failures they’ve encountered in their lives so far, and what they’ve learned from them
Successes and struggles they’ve had with individual assignments
Creating groups isn’t difficult. All Learning Management Systems (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Brightspace, etc.) have functionality for creating student. While technology like Zoom, WhatsApp, Facetime, and Skype make it really easy for students to meetup. This makes it simple to leverage group work and increase your student’s feeling of connection.
What can feel a little more daunting about online groups is grading/assessment. Here’s how to tackle that:
2) Team Work + Individual (Video) Reflections
Have the students complete their exercises together, but have them turn in individual reflections.
In our classes, we encourage students to work together but require each student to submit their own video-based reflections on the work they’ve done. These videos (which we limit to 1 – 3 minutes), speed up the assessment process, cutting down on overall assessment time while ensuring each student is developing their own skills.
Mistake #3: Not Using Webcams
Webcams establish an instant face-to-face connection which is incredibly helpful in establishing a connection with your students. We recommend, whenever possible, using your own webcam, and to encourage your students to use webcams themselves.
When we ask for student submissions, we have them use a tool called Loom, which is an easy-to-use browser extension which allows students to simply record their screen and capture their webcam at the same time. We’ve used Loom thousands of students and have had great results.
Loom lets you see your students (establishing a connection) and gives you a real insight into what they’ve been working on. We’ve found this is an invaluable tool in discovering how well they understand the concepts being taught in class. It also leads to a deeper level of understanding of the material because students will need to be able to write about the subject as well as talk about it concisely. We do recommend setting time guidelines for the videos. For example, we have students make videos 2-3 minutes long. This reduces the amount of time needed to go through the videos.
Mistake #4: “Read and Regurgitate” Discussion Boards
Typically, discussion boards are used as a way to ensure students complete some reading by asking students to reflect on what they’ve read, and possibly comment on another student’s post. Most of the time, this leads to students simply summarizing what they read and writing similar comments on fellow students’ posts. Unfortunately, this doesn’t lead to a lot of in-depth discussion or reflection.
Discussion boards are optimal when people are presenting diverse viewpoints as opposed to all reflecting similar ideas.
We recommend using discussion boards for personal reflections. For example, instead of asking students to go through an experience and describe what the experience was, have them talk about their personal challenges that came up with the experience. Ask what they learned most as a result of the experience. How are they going to apply that skill going forward?
Making personal comments creates a connected feeling in the class as students read other people’s responses. They get to know each other better and you get a sense of if they’re really understanding what you want them to take away from the material.
Discussion boards can also be used for students to pitch business ideas. You can even have students form teams around pitch ideas. Any experience you can create where students are leveraging different ideas is a great place to use discussion boards.
Mistake #5: “Class-Based” Thinking
It’s hard enough to create an engaging classroom in-person. Going online can feel even more daunting because we don’t have the opportunity for real-time interaction with students.
That said, there’s a little-known benefit to teaching online that can be used to create extremely engaging experiences.
When teaching in-person classes, it’s normal to have your thinking centered on “classes.” Whether a 75-minute class, 90-minute class, etc., we know that we have X-amount of things we want to cover in that amount of time. However, an online class doesn’t have the same time constraints.
We have found that it’s helpful to shift from a “class” structure to focus on creating “ah-ha” experiences for our students. Start by thinking about the ah-ha moments you have in your in-person classes and write out all of the interactions you have with your students that lead up to that moment. Then start translating each of those interactions online. Once you start thinking on an “interaction” level, as opposed to a “class” level, it’s much easier to…
Structure your course around creating “ah-ha” experiences.
As we created the online version of our in-person curriculum, we’ve had to tease out the interactive moments between instructor and students and rethink the time frame of these interactions. For example, in an in-person class, the professor can provide a prompt and the students respond in real-time and the entire lesson may only take 30 minutes. Online, this same lesson may span two weeks as the professor provides a prompt, awaits student responses, provides counter-discussion or reflection, etc. While this takes longer calendar-wise, we have found it is possible to create just as engaging of an experience for online students as we have in-person, by focusing primarily on these interactions.
For example, in the first class of our curriculum, we have students write out on post-it notes their fears and curiosities after they graduate. We then have them share their fears and curiosities with someone sitting next to them. We then create post-it note clouds around common themes they share. Then our instructors take those common challenges and map them into their syllabus. Some common fears are:
How am I going to find a job?
Is my job going to pay enough?
Am I going to like my job?
Professors then take these common problems or themes and point towards the places in the syllabus that will help address them. Students then realize, “Oh, even if I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, here’s what I’m going to get out of this class or entrepreneurial skills.” This whole process takes roughly 30 minutes in-person.
The online version, on the other hand, is more drawn out. First students fill out a survey that says “here are my fears and curiosities.” Then they utilize the aforementioned reflection groups where they’ll talk about their challenges. Then the instructor takes the survey results and makes a video response connecting the dots between their students’ challenges, and their syllabus. So, the interaction takes longer in terms of calendar time but creates the same “ah-ha” moment as students realize the value entrepreneurship skills can have on their lives, even if they don’t see themselves becoming entrepreneurs.
Takeaways
Transitioning to teaching online can be challenging, but it can also be extremely effective. If you want to make sure your students:
Avoid cramming
Feel connected to you and your other students
Engage fully in your class
We recommend:
Having multiple touch points per week
Group assignments w/ individual reflections
Everyone record videos with webcams
Use discussion boards for personal reflections
Replicate your interactions, not your classes, online
If you’d like more tips on running successful online classes, subscribe here to get the next one in your inbox.
If you have any suggestions to fix the mistakes above or want to recommend any mistakes we missed, please let us know!
In the meantime…
We Need Your Questions!
During this time of uncertainty, we want to hear what challenges you’re running into, and questions you have. We’re eager to experiment with ways to serve the teaching community, but like good innovators, we want to make sure we’re solving real problems.
In my role as USASBE President-elect, I’m hosting a USASBE Virtual Town Hall on March 25th, where we’ll discuss your challenges in detail. Answering the question above, or clicking the image below, will register you for the discussion, and make sure you get the recording afterward.
If you’re looking for a structured, comprehensive, and engaging experiential entrepreneurship curriculum you can run with your students in person, or online, check out the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.
Used at more than 80 colleges and universities, ExEC helps students feel connected with you, and one another, while they learn practical entrepreneurial skills regardless of their career path.
