Online Archives

Winter Summit Invite

November 10, 2020 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

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

Entrepreneurship Educators Attending the Teaching Entrepreneurship Summit

In fact, we had such a good time…

We’re doing it again…with more new exercises!

Join us at the Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit for two interactive days of workshops and exercises.

REGISTER NOW!

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!

Join us at the Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit to:

Play the game
Get access for your students
Get a lesson plan on how to use it!

Early Bird Tickets Available!

REGISTER NOW!

We know budgets are tight right now so we’re offering a new “Live Access Only” ticket free of charge.

Or if you’d like to have recordings and slides from the Summit:

Register before Dec. 2nd for $100 off the Full Access ticket.

REGISTER NOW!

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:

Slido: Our Favorite Tool for Online Engagement. Zoom fatigue is ruining student engagement in online classes. Use Slido to inject energy and interaction into your online classes.
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.

Want More Engaged Students?

Check out the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.

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

in any course structure
on all major learning management system

Preview ExEC Now

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.

3 (Easier) Ways to Combine Your Camera and Slides

November 2, 2020 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

Our previous article on how to combine your slides and webcam to engage students was a hit because…

Only trouble was, it was a little complicated to get this technique working. Fortunately, new tools have come along, and now…

It’s much easier to integrate your webcam in your slides!

Easiest Solution if you Use Zoom

In Zoom, your presentation can now be your virtual background!

This setup puts you directly on top of your slides, so you can interact with your slides as you’re leading your students through them.

What It Looks Like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuxSjLzCrW4

How to Do It

For the step-by-step instructions, read this article from Zoom.

Caveats

While this is a wonderfully simple solution, there are some things to keep in mind:

It’s beta functionality, meaning Zoom is actively working on it. There might be rough edges to the experience for a few more months.
For the best effect, your computer needs to be able to support Zoom’s virtual backgrounds
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8KhKBLoSMk

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.

https://youtu.be/bjTAyTRU7aQ

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.

Combine slides and camera to engage students

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:

Slido: Our Favorite Tool for Online Engagement. Zoom fatigue is ruining student engagement in online classes. Use Slido to inject energy and interaction into your online classes.
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.

Want More Engaged Students?

Check out the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.

in any course structure
on all major learning management system

Preview ExEC Now

Less Time = More Engagement

October 26, 2020 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

Teaching online is harder:

Your students (and you!) get Zoom fatigue
Hybrid teaching provides extra challenges
Students start to disengage

…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.

When we designed the online version of ExEC, we conducted considerable research on the best resources to increase online engagement.

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!

Preview ExEC Now

Slido: Our Favorite Tool for Online Engagement

October 18, 2020 Justin Wilcox Comments 0 Comment

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 minds. 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:

Summary

If you want to inject a little energy into your class, we’ve found one simple tool – Slido – that enables you to:

Solicit anonymous, prioritized questions from your students
Brainstorm ideas with students, including their takeaways
Engage students with fun, interactive competition

Give it a shot and let us know how it goes!

Hybrid Teaching Tips

August 3, 2020 Doan Winkel Comments 0 Comment

If you’re being asked to teach a hybrid, or “HyFlex” class, where some students are in person, and some are online and are worried about managing both environments, here are some tips for creating the best experience possible for your students:

Tip #1: Don’t Do It!

Engaging students is hard enough in-person. Engaging them online is more challenging. Now imagine trying to do both…simultaneously.

In some cases, hybrid classes are our administrations falling into the same trap as our entrepreneurs:

Afraid of losing customers, they’re trying to be everything to everyone. As a result, they’ll create a product no one wants.

To be clear, “HyFlex” classes have their place. Namely large, lecture-based classes with limited interaction.

If you’re teaching entrepreneurship however, your students will be best served by moving your classes online now. Remember that in-person classes, with everyone in masks and six feet apart, aren’t going to be the normal classes we remember:

So if you want to engage your students, online is the way to go. Plus, once you commit to going online, you can invest in creating a great class there.

Just like we teach our students…

We need to solve one problem well, not multiple problems poorly. Of course, you may not be entirely in control of the decision to go online.

If that’s true for you…

Tip #2: Teach Online to In-Person Students

If your hands are tied and you need to teach a hybrid class, knowing that:

You can’t engage students simultaneously on Zoom and in-person
In-person students will be socially distant from one another

All of your students will be better served if they are online, even when they’re “in-person.”

When your in-person students bring their laptops to class and everyone is on your video conference call (e.g. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.) you can:

Do virtual Post-It note exercises with all students simultaneously
Host class-wide discussions including everyone
Have small group breakouts
Ensure equitable access for all students

Having all of your students in one place, even if that place is online, will make the experience more manageable for you, and more engaging for your students.

Tip #3: Answer These Tech Questions

When setting up your hybrid classroom, there are a couple of questions you’ll need to answer (possibly with the help of your IT team):

How will in-person students be able to speak, and ask questions, so that your online students can hear them? You’ll need microphone(s) in your classroom to pick up the audio from your in-person students so your online students can hear.
How will online students be able to speak and ask questions without hearing feedback? You’ll need speakers in your classroom so your in-person students can listen to what the online students are saying. Unfortunately, the microphones required for question #1 above will often pick up the audio from those speakers, creating an annoying feedback loop where online students hear themselves talk with a slight delay (which will virtually guarantee they don’t participate in discussions).
How will online students be able to see who is speaking in the classroom? You’ll need at least two cameras in your classroom: 1) one facing towards the front of the room so online students can see when you’re speaking and 2) one facing towards your in-person students so the online students can see when an in-person student is talking. You’ll also want a way for the video conference software to automatically switch between those two cameras based on who is speaking.
How will in-person students present their work (e.g., pitches, presentations, etc.) so online students can see them? In-person students will need to simultaneously project their slides so that other in-person students can see them, while also screen sharing them so online students can see them.
How will online students present their work so that in-person students can see them? You’ll need to project your video conferencing software within your classroom so the in-person students can view presentations from online students.

Begs the Question

If you’re just going to have in-person students attend online, what’s the point in having in-person classes at all?

To which we say…exactly.

Not only are hybrid classes infeasible from an engagement perspective, but they’re also a technical nightmare (see Tip #1: Don’t Do It, and avoid the headaches of hybrid classes from the beginning).

Tip #4: Use Online-Ready Exercises

If you’re following along, you know the most effective way to run hybrid classes will be online. With that in mind, the next step is to find online resources to use for your class.

Whether you use an online-ready curriculum like the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC), or you assemble your own online activities, now is the time to start prepping your online class for Fall.

Note: ExEC’s Canvas, D2L, Blackboard, and Moodle templates can get your class set up in less than 5 minutes.

Our Students Deserve Better.

Our students weren’t disappointed with “online classes” last spring. They were disappointed by the way we delivered our online classes.

We didn’t have a chance to prep in Spring, but we should have no excuses for Fall.

Hybrid, or HyFlex classes, are just online classes with another name. If you invest in prepping your class to go online now, you can deliver the experience your students deserve.

Stay safe, and let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help you prep for Fall!

Best,

Justin Wilcox
Founder
TeachingEntrepreneurship.org

Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus

May 18, 2020 Doan Winkel Comments 1 comment

Teaching an online entrepreneurship class to students who are used to taking classes in-person can be particularly challenging:

Discussions can be lethargic
Students are sometimes unmotivated
You can end up teaching into the “void” with little input or interaction from your students

If you’ve run one of these lectures, you probably didn’t get much out of the experience and neither did your students.

To genuinely engage online students, rethink your course from top-to-bottom. You want to answer questions like, how do you…

Redesign your interactive exercises to work online?
Get students to reliably ask and answer questions?
Connect students to each other, and the material, when they’re socially isolated?

As you start your redesign, we wanted to share our online course syllabus in case it’s helpful.

A Blend of Sync and Async

No one likes teaching to the void (or being in the void).

What is the void? Have you ever used Zoom to teach to a bunch of black boxes? Or were your students’ cameras turned on but you consistently confronted with awkward silences and blank stares? Engagement is very difficult to maintain in an online course. Asynchronous is the most popular way to teach online, but an asynchronous learning environment alone can feel disconnecting to your students.

We wanted to avoid teaching to the void, and the disconnecting feelings it can create, so our syllabus is a combination of asynchronous activities students do individually with:

Interactive Synchronous Sessions. These experiential learning activities engage students and keep them motivated even when they’re learning remotely.
Reflection groups. This component of our online entrepreneurship course brings students together at regular intervals to share and process their experiences and processes. In these groups, students can reflect on the processes and the product of their journey through the course, helping them to learn from and teach each other, and also encouraging them to support each other thrive during the journey.
Check-ins. One of the biggest challenges experiential entrepreneurship classes face is that different teams progress at different speeds. Students who fall behind get discouraged when the class progresses to topics that are not yet relevant to them. Students who find success in making progress get bored if the class content stalls their progress. We also know that students can run into unique challenges in project-based classes, especially when they are online, and that students highly value time with instructors to help them overcome those challenges. One of the most successful remedies to both the problems outlined above is to provide students with differentiated learning experiences, via coaching/check-in sessions with teams. Every coaching session is an opportunity for students to measure the skills they’ve acquired in order to learn what to do next.

Skills-Based

An experiential entrepreneurship course, done well, helps students gain transferable skills they can use to create value for anyone or any organization in their professional and personal life. These skills are particularly important during times of uncertainty we are currently living through.

Find a Problem Worth Solving

Our curriculum has two phases of skill-building. The goal of Phase 1 is to find a problem worth solving. These are the skills taught in that phase:

Growth Mindset. This mindset is the belief a person has that they can learn more or be good at anything if they work hard and persevere. It is important to set the stage with this skill so students believe they can be good at anything, and that skill comes from practice.
Leveraging Failure. Failure is inevitable in the entrepreneurial process – we want students to build the skill set to take advantage of their failures to
Idea Generation. We don’t want your students to work on just any idea. Our syllabus highlights exercises and lesson plans that invite them to practice the skills necessary to discover ideas that bring them meaning. Once they have that idea, we guide them through identifying and actually locating their Early Adopters.
Customer Interviewing. The most critical skill entrepreneurs must learn is interviewing customers. Our exercises guide students through learning what to ask customers, iteratively practicing customer interviews, and analyzing interviews to guide their business model iteration.
Problem Validation. Students must decide whether they have validated a problem and whether they want to work on solving it or pivot to solve a different problem.

Find a Solution Worth Building

The goal of Phase 2 is to find a solution worth building. These are the skills taught in that phase:

Creativity & Design Thinking. These exercises enhance students’ brainstorming skills and how to develop solutions based on customers’ problems.
Financial Modeling. Successful entrepreneurship requires entrepreneurs to effectively monetize solutions. During this stage, students practice pricing and building a viable financial model.
Prototyping. Here we teach students to build new versions of their product that allows them to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Experiments. Running business model experiments is your students’ fastest path to success. Students learn to make small bets and test a number of different strategies until they find one that works.
Storytelling. In our curriculum, students don’t pitch their product/company. Instead, they share the story of the process they went through (in)validating their business model. In this way, they demonstrate they have acquired the entrepreneurial skills to find and test new opportunities.

Experiential

Your students should experience creating and capturing value, not passively learn about others who have. Experiential learning techniques are critical to any entrepreneurship course because they increase student engagement and excitement as they build knowledge by doing.

Using our new online syllabus gives you a way to engage and excite your students from the first through the last day with our innovative approach to experiential learning. One example of our approach to experiential learning is our award-winning Lottery Ticket Dilemma exercise.

Through this exercise, students will discover how important emotions are in the decision-making process and the importance of understanding and fulfilling other people’s emotional needs.

Specifically, students will experience:

Why the majority of businesses that start end in failure, & how to avoid those failures, & so students learn how to recognize and avoid those failures
Customers making decisions driven by their emotions, & so students learn how to uncover and leverage those emotions to create solutions customers want
Creating products customers want to purchase by understanding the emotional journey they want to take

Get the Online Entrepreneurship Sample Syllabus

We’ve created a detailed Online Entrepreneurship sample syllabus that details the components of a full semester course.

It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers, so you’re welcome to share it.

Lecture Less & Coach More With the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum

Want to create engaging experiences for your entrepreneurship students? Check out the award-winning Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC). Request a preview of ExEC today and make next semester the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet! Our curriculum is full of experiential exercises that will make your students’ learning come alive.

Preparing for Class During the Coronavirus

March 12, 2020 Sara Zuboff Comments 0 Comment

As the Coronavirus spreads, more and more schools are transitioning to online classes.

If you’re asked to teach entrepreneurship online, know that we’ve accelerated the development of ExEC Online due to the outbreak. If you’d like to use it, please reach out and we’ll see if/how we can be most helpful.

Fortunately, teaching with ExEC Online takes relatively little prep – much of the teaching material is already prepared – and student engagement is at least as high as in-person classes.

For more information on teaching entrepreneurship online with ExEC, click here.

Otherwise, please stay as safe (and stress-free) as possible, and let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help.

A Better Way to Teach Entrepreneurship Online

February 11, 2020 Sara Zuboff Comments 2 comments

Teaching entrepreneurship online is daunting. In addition to the technical challenges, teaching entrepreneurship online comes with extra questions like:

How do you make online classes experiential?
How do you keep virtual students engaged?
How do create connections between you and your students?

And most importantly…

How to can you teach entrepreneurial skills online?

Introducing ExEC Online

Over the last 5 years, we’ve worked hard to produce the best available experiential entrepreneurship curriculum possible. During that time, we’ve had a laser focus on in-person classes. Over the same time period…

We’ve seen an increasing number of our instructors being asked to teach entrepreneurship online.

This shift has inspired us to run an experiment this semester, creating a special version of ExEC that:

Teaches entrepreneurship online
Using the same experiential, interactive, approach we use for in-person classes
That creates meaningful connections between students and professors

And most importantly…

Builds students’ entrepreneurial skills, regardless of where their career takes them!

Coming Summer 2020

This spring, we, the founding team of TeachingEntrepreneurship.org are alpha testing the first version of ExEC online at John Carroll University.

Our ExEC Online students are launching companies, running experiments, testing their hypotheses and interviewing customers – everything they do in our in-person ExEC classes!

But that’s not even the best part. Based on what we’ve seen so far…

ExEC online could enable you to spend less time prepping, and more time coaching and mentoring individual students, which means your online classes could potentially be, more impactful than your in-person classes.

The combination of:

Automatically scheduled assignments
Pre-recorded video lessons
Online experiential exercises that integrate with your LMS and
Quick-grading rubrics

…means you can significantly reduce your prep.

Imagine an experiential, skill-building, online entrepreneurship course, with 10% of the prep of a traditional class – and just as much impact.

When Will You Teach Online?

Looking at the flexibility online classes offer students, and the potential for growth they offer universities means, it looks like online classes will be the part of all of our futures’.

For example, below you can see close to 50% of all Oregon Public school students are taking online classes now – more than double the rate just 10 years ago.

Whether you’re already teaching online, or think it could be in your future, know that we’re developing and testing an online version of our award winning experiential curriculum, that you can use starting Fall 2020.

Curious about ExEC Online?

If you’re teaching entrepreneurship in an online, or hybrid, class in Fall or Spring of next year and are curious about our online experiments, let us know and we’ll show you what we’re up to:

Dec. 9thHow to Build an App(without writing code)

Dec. 16thEntrepreneurial Plinko:

Why Business Plans Don’t Work

Missed Our Recent Articles?

Want More Engaged Students?

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Easiest Solution if you Use Zoom

What It Looks Like

How to Do It

Caveats

Easiest Solution if You Use a Mac

Setting Up mmhmm

Easiest Universal Solution

See It In Action

Missed Our Recent Articles?

Want More Engaged Students?

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Increase Student Engagement

Engage Students in Ideation

Example Idea Generation

Engage in Interviews Done Right

Make Hybrid Easier

Keep Students Motivated

Make Spring Better

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Encourage Anonymous Questions

Crystalize Learnings

Quiz Games

See it All in Action

Summary

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Tip #1: Don’t Do It!

Tip #2: Teach Online to In-Person Students

Tip #3: Answer These Tech Questions

Recommended Solution

Begs the Question

Tip #4: Use Online-Ready Exercises

Our Students Deserve Better.

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

A Blend of Sync and Async

Skills-Based

Find a Problem Worth Solving

Find a Solution Worth Building

Experiential

Get the Online Entrepreneurship Sample Syllabus

Lecture Less & Coach More With the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Introducing ExEC Online

Coming Summer 2020

When Will You Teach Online?

Curious about ExEC Online?

ExEC Online Interest Form

Want 30+ more engaging exercises?

Dec. 9th
How to Build an App
(without writing code)

Dec. 16th
Entrepreneurial Plinko: