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Business Plans vs Business Models/Canvases: Data from Entrepreneurship Classes

Business Plans vs Business Models/Canvases: Data from Entrepreneurship Classes

Why do many folks teach business plans?

From our research . . .

It’s not because they think the business plans are the best tool for building a business.

We asked the Teaching Entrepreneurship community what tools they teach and many of the instructors we surveyed teach business plans because it’s a course requirement or because they believe it’s “standard practice” outside academia.

Our research appears to contradict the notion that business plans are standard practice as a majority (57%) of instructors outside academia don’t teach business plans at all.

In fact, across the nearly 300 instructors we surveyed, only 8% teach the business plan exclusively.

Compare that to the 88% of instructors who teach one of the “canvases” (e.g. Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) and it’s clear business plans are no longer the de facto standard.

The most popular tools to teach entrepreneurship

Why Do Teachers Love the Business Plan?

The few respondents teaching only the business plan cited many reasons for preferring this tool. The most commons reasons are:

  • It is a comprehensive tool
  • It is necessary for some funding sources like bank loans
  • It is required by standards in the respondent’s particular context

But the vast majority of teachers don’t feel that way – across all teacher populations we surveyed (K-12 and higher ed, academic and non-academic, from the US and abroad), only 8% teach only the business plan

For instructors and course coordinators who still teach the business plan:

  • Requirements that business plans be taught because they are seen as a standard entrepreneurial practice should be reconsidered.
  • While some instructors see benefits in teaching business plans, and they may be important to teach in some circumstances, they are taught by a minority of instructors both inside and outside academia and should no longer be considered the de facto standard for describing businesses.

What Entrepreneurship Tools Do Teachers Use?

“Canvases” (Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) have replaced the business plan as the most popular teaching tool.

As we mentioned earlier, 88% of instructors we surveyed teach with some version of a Canvas, and 50% teach the Business Model Canvas. 

Why Do Teachers Love the Canvas?

Our respondents cited many reasons for preferring the Business Model Canvas. The most common reasons are:

  • It is simple and user friendly. Specifically, some teachers noted the BMC is a way to engage non-business students that is not intimidating.
  • It forces students to focus on customer development and experimentation as they pursue product-market fit.
  • It is the dominant tool used in “the real world.”

Because of the dominance of the BMC in entrepreneurship education, we engaged Dr. Alexander Osterwalder in a series of posts to share how he teaches this tool. 

How Do The Entrepreneurship Tools You Use Compare To Your Peers?

  • Nearly 80% of K-12 teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
  • Nearly 90% of academic teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
  • Nearly 90% of US-based teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.

Other Popular Entrepreneurship Education Tools

AI Tools

To see the full list of additional teaching tools, please enter your email below.

In future posts we will share more about our upcoming TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Summer Summit and about tools and methods to increase student engagement.

Subscribe here to get info delivered in your inbox.

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Teaching Entrepreneurship AI Summit Summer 2023

Teaching Entrepreneurship AI Summit Summer 2023


The Teaching Entrepreneurship Summit is back with . . .

4 AI Workshops for Educators!

With new AI tools coming out every day, it’s hard to know which ones are useful for teaching.

In this special AI summit, you’ll:

  • Get up to speed on AI in education
  • Get several fun exercises to show your students the power of AI
  • Discover how to avoid AI plagiarism
  • Learn how AI can save you endless time (e.g. faster assessment)

Register Here


Learn Best Practices For Leveraging AI

The Teaching Entrepreneurship Summit will help you make the most of AI.

Register now so you don’t miss it!

Each session 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, May 9th

AI Demystified: A Guide for Entrepreneurship Educators

Exercises to introduce your students (and yourself) to AI:

  • What are the best AI tools for entrepreneurship classes?
  • How can AI improve students’ business ideas?
  • How can AI make assessment faster?
  • How do you mitigate concerns about AI in the classroom?

Tuesday, May 16th

Using AI to Teach Customer Interviewing

The pandemic only exacerbated students’ customer interviewing anxiety.

In this session you’ll learn AI-powered exercises to help your students:

  • Find the right customers to interview
  • Learn the best questions to ask
  • Practice customer interviews with an AI “chat coach”

. . . all of which will build their interviewing confidence!


Tuesday, May 23rd

Teaching AI-Enabled Financial Modeling

Blow your students’ minds when you show them how easy it is to make robust financial models with the help of AI.

During this workshop you’ll get exercises to help your students:

  • Understand financial concepts
  • Develop accurate financial models
  • Learn how to validate those models in the real world

Tuesday, May 30th

AI Tools to Build Better MVPs 

Your students will be able to test demand for their products and services faster than ever with AI tools to help them:

  • Launch professional MVPs in minutes (no coding required)
  • Write amazing marketing copy
  • Generate powerful imagery for their MVPs, ads, and videos (no design experience required)

Register Here


Early Bird Tickets Available

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

Plus: Full Access tickets, which include recordings, slides, and a certificate of participation are $100 off before April 28th.

BONUS: We’re a team of experienced engineers, educators, and entrepreneurs with decades of combined experience. We know AI can be intimidating, so we’ve done the work sifting through what’s out there and what’s worth it.

Exclusive to Full Access ticket holders, join us for an “Ask Us Anything” session where we’ll help you tackle any challenge you have in your entrepreneurship class – AI-related or otherwise.

Register here so you don’t miss the AI Summer 2023 Summit!

Register Here

Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit

Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit

Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit 2022


The Teaching Entrepreneurship Winter Summit is back with . . .

2 New Workshops!

You and our community of entrepreneurship educators voted for your favorite workshops, and now they’re happening!

Register Here

Learn Best Practices

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

Winter Summit 2022: 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

Winter summit: Engagement From Day One

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.

Register Here

Early Bird Tickets Available

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

Plus: Full Access tickets, which include recordings and slides, are $100 off before November 30th.

Winter Summit Benefits

Winter Summit map

At our last summit. . .

600+ educators joined us live!

Register here so you don’t miss the Winter Summit!

Register Here

Hybrid Teaching Tips

Hybrid Teaching Tips

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:

  1. You can’t engage students simultaneously on Zoom and in-person
  2. 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):

  1. 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.
  2. 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).
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. How will online students present their work so that in-person students can see them? You’ll need to project your video conferencing software within your classroom so the in-person students can view presentations from online students.

Recommended Solution

The easiest way to solve all of the issues above is actually to follow Tip #2: Teach Online to In-Person Students. When all of your in-person students bring their laptops and headphones to class and log in to your virtual meeting – as long as they unmute their microphones whenever they want to speak – all of a sudden:

  • Online students can see and hear in-person students, and vice versa
  • You can have class-wide discussions without headaches
  • Anyone can easily present their camera, screen and/or slides

This solution, of course…

Begs the Question

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

To which we say…exactly.

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

Tip #4: Use Online-Ready Exercises

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

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

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Logo

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.

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Logo

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

Custom Online & Hybrid Sample Entrepreneurship Syllabus

Custom Online & Hybrid Sample Entrepreneurship Syllabus

Whether or not your Fall starts online, it is almost certain that your Fall will finish online. As more colleges announce shifts online last week, Inside Higher Ed wrote:

“Colleges and universities [are] conceding that previously announced plans to resume in-person learning are no longer feasible.”

Between the social nature of students, the continuing spread of COVID, and the steps our schools will need to take once students start testing positive, it’s increasingly likely classes in the US will end up online this Fall.

Get Prepared

To help with your preparation, we’ve published an extremely flexible sample syllabus you can customize for just about any learning environment: 

Whether your class ends up:

  1. In-person
  2. Online synchronous
  3. Online asynchronous
  4. Hybrid

…or transitions between them, the sample syllabus will show you how to design an engaging and structured course for Fall.

Comprehensive Online Curriculum

In addition to the sample syllabus, you’ll get a preview of the checklist all of our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) instructors use to prepare their courses.

For more details on using ExEC this Fall, request a full preview of ExEC.

teaching entrepreneurship

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Missed Our Recent Articles?

Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:

  • Consistently Teaching with Adjuncts. The hardest part about coordinating classes taught by adjuncts is delivering a consistent experience when multiple instructors teach the same course.
Top 5 Resources for Increasing Online Engagement

Top 5 Resources for Increasing Online Engagement

Here are our top 5 resources for increasing engagement in your online classes:

#1: Split Screen Your Slides & Webcam

If you’re wondering whether your students are paying attention during your online lectures…they’re not.

To make your online lectures more engaging, check out these instructions on combining your slides and Webcam for your Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet sessions.


#2: Sample Online / Hybrid Syllabus

You can customize this flexible sample syllabus to work for just about any learning environment. Whether your class ends up:

  1. In-person
  2. Online synchronous
  3. Online asynchronous
  4. Hybrid

…or transitions between them, this sample syllabus will help you design an engaging and structured course.

Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus Structure

#3: Online Ice Breaker & Team Builder

You can create the most amazing content, and deliver it in the most engaging manner. But if your students are in teams that are dysfunctional, or just sleepy, their learning can come to a screeching halt as they disengage.

Bonus: The Skills Scavenger Hunt exercise is also a great icebreaker, which can be extremely helpful in terms of fostering connections between students taking an online class.

Kahoot Learning Games

#4: 10 Free Tools to Increase Online Engagement

During the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Virtual Conference, we presented 10 Tools to Increase Online Student Engagement.

Mural digital workspace

Read about all 10 tools, including:

  • Mural
  • Loom
  • Flipgrid
  • Kahoot
  • and many more…

#5: Motivating Your Students Online: Pilot Your Purpose Lesson Plan

Help your students unlock their purpose, and they will be motivated to learn the entire semester!

Pilot Your Purpose Exercise

Especially in an online environment, you can more easily engage students by tapping into their intrinsic motivation. In other words, learn how to leverage students’ internal drivers and your class sessions will buzz with energy. 


Bonus: Creating Digital Worksheets

The key to engaging students, especially online, is to make lectures interactive.

One of the best ways to do that is to create digital worksheets your students can use to apply the lesson you’re teaching in real-time. 


Experiential Online Curriculum

If you’re teaching entrepreneurship online, you can have an engaging class without reinventing the wheel.

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Logo

Whether your online class is synchronous or asynchronous, the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) is optimized for online and hybrid classes.

If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person for your entrepreneurship curriculum, including an entrepreneurship syllabus template and 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans, check out ExEC.

fall prep with Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum

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Consistently Teach with Faculty & Adjuncts

Consistently Teach with Faculty & Adjuncts

The hardest part about coordinating classes taught by adjuncts is delivering a…

Consistent experience when multiple instructors teach the same course.

Especially true for Intro to Entrepreneurship classes, high turnover among adjuncts and different areas of expertise among faculty can mean students have vastly different experiences depending on who teaches their particular section.

This inconsistency often leads to lower enrollment and knowledge gaps that affect subsequent entrepreneurship classes.

Solution: “Flexible Structure”

To eliminate these inconsistencies while growing your entrepreneurship program, ensure your Intro to Entrepreneurship curriculum is all three of the following:

  1. Experiential. Lecture-based classes not only neglect to teach students skills, they fail to inspire students to continue their entrepreneurial journey. To grow an entrepreneurship program, your first course needs to be both relevant and engaging – experiential classes can be both.
  2. Structured. Experiential courses are great, but most educators don’t have time to design their own comprehensive set of experiences. Instead, they piecemeal activities from a variety of sources resulting in courses that lack a cohesive framework and leave gaps in students’ understanding. Having a coherent set of lesson plans that all instructors utilize means that students get both a robust and consistent experience.

    Plus, a consistent framework makes onboarding new instructors much easier.

  3. Flexible. Of course, structured curricula must also enable instructors to leverage their personal strengths (i.e. research specialties, entrepreneurial experiences, personal networks, etc.). The framework you use needs to be modular enough that it allows instructors to make the class their own, while still maintaining the core of the curriculum.

This unique “Flexible Structure” is precisely why so many…

Large Programs Use ExEC

The Experiential Entrepreneurship Curruciulm (ExEC) has become a popular choice when course coordinators want high-quality lessons that deliver consistent experiences across all sections.

For example, when Cal Poly’s Jonathan York wanted to improve his 500+ student / multi-instructor Intro to Entrepreneurship course, he chose ExEC:

Likewise, when Florida State University wanted to provide more structure for the instructors teaching their hundreds of entrepreneurship students, they adopted ExEC…

Cal Poly: 500+ Students and 10 Instructors

We recently sat down with Jonathan York of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to discuss his experience transitioning to ExEC and why he recommends it for other professors and universities looking to streamline their entrepreneurship curriculum.

Jon is Professor Emeritus of Entrepreneurship and Cofounder of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Cal Poly. Like most professors, when he began teaching entrepreneurship he found himself searching for and saving specific resources in Google Docs to help augment the textbook and lesson plans.

As an entrepreneurship professor, “I was constantly looking for more tools I could use in class,” he shares. While he felt capable of finding great resources to use in the classroom, once he needed to get his fellow professors and adjuncts on the same page, this method wasn’t sustainable. Cal Poly teaches over 500 entrepreneurship students a quarter with more than 10 professors and ever-changing adjunct faculty. Their entrepreneurship curriculum needs were larger than could be handled with Google Docs.

While looking for a solution to get his entrepreneurship department on the same page he found ExEC

“ExEC helped bring everything I wanted to teach in one place.”

Adopting the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum 

When implementing ExEC, what stood out for Jon was that it was powerful to divide the quarter into two “sprints,” the first called “finding a problem worth solving” and the second “finding a solution worth building.” He recommends this strategy of “grouping the lessons into themes” divided into the 10 week quarter.

When Jon first started using ExEC, there were some tweaks in the first quarter, but after fine-tuning the timing for the lesson plans, he found it to be an easy switch from his previous approach of combining lots of tools coordinated through Moodle, which led to considerable student confusion and frustration.

While designed to be taught in 15-weeks, the ExEC curriculum clearly states the goals and objectives of each lesson. This helps professors easily group the lessons thematically for their quarter system.

The main benefit of using ExEC is it made it easier for Jon to ensure consistency in the entrepreneurship classes taught at Cal Poly. It helped unify the entrepreneurship department and align professors and adjuncts alike with not just what was going to be taught with entrepreneurship, but how.

Adjunct professors in particular may be successful entrepreneurs but new to teaching. Of teaching entrepreneurship, Jon says, “You don’t just want warhorses sitting around telling stories.”

The goal of an entrepreneurship class is to engage.

When they rolled out ExEC with the Cal Poly faculty, Jon held weekly meetings to help with any questions or trouble-shooting, which is what he recommends for any organization looking to adopt ExEC. He started with 3 professors using the curriculum with other professors observing. This helped identify any tweaks that may be needed with the timing of lesson plans and solidified the staff’s confidence in using ExEC.

With any new tool, there’s a certain learning curve to be expected. However, when adopting ExEC, professors aren’t alone in trying to figure out how to teach the lesson plans. We offer a comprehensive and responsive customer service not found with a traditional textbook.

Engaging Entrepreneurship Lesson Plans

Overall, the rollout of ExEC at Cal Poly was successful. Jon really enjoyed the Early Adopter modules and the Business Model Canvas (BMC) aspects of the ExEC curriculum. For instance, the BMC lesson is designed to provide an overview showing where each lesson fits into the overall curriculum, it also provides professors with a view of the big picture – where they’ve been, where they are, and where they are going. Think of the Business Model Canvas as the map that shows the flow of lesson plans throughout the curriculum.

When teaching any of the lesson plans to his entrepreneurship students, he had this to say: “your pre-class materials prepared my students better than anything I have used before.” Unlike a textbook that puts the onus on the instructor to prepare how to teach the information, ExEC includes thorough instructions for how to prepare before class, including all the necessary resources to use during class.  

We also include information on what students should do after class to help create an experience that resonates beyond the classroom. 

We have found that this dramatically cuts down on any necessary prep-time for the professor. It also creates a comprehensive curriculum that engages every student, whether your entrepreneurship program is large or small.

An Evolving Curriculum

We know that experiential education is really difficult to execute. We’ve created a foolproof system to teach each lesson successfully.

Our goal is that your students are engaged with each lesson throughout the entire entrepreneurship curriculum.

When asked if he would recommend ExEC to other professors or universities looking to expand their entrepreneurship curriculum beyond a traditional textbook, Jon answered, “Yes. With each iteration, it keeps getting better.”

The average print textbook is considered out of date in 3 years. In the ever-evolving world of entrepreneurship, time is invaluable. With ExEC, updates to entrepreneurship lesson plans happen immediately and are implemented seamlessly. This helps keep your university’s program on the cutting edge of entrepreneurship education.

We pride ourselves in practicing what we preach. We’ve applied the invaluable feedback we received from professors and students alike in our latest version of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC). We’ve designed it to include the best practices of entrepreneurship education. And after just 2 years, ExEC is now being used at almost 100 universities!

If you want more engagement, more structure, and more impact, now is your chance with ExEC!

Start Engaging this Fall with ExEC

Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum Logo

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 every 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.

Get our Next Free Lesson Plan

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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:

Skills Scavenger Hunt: Online Icebreaker & Team Building Exercise

Skills Scavenger Hunt: Online Icebreaker & Team Building Exercise

If students don’t form into high-performance teams, their learning curve significantly flattens.

You can create the most amazing content, and deliver it in the most engaging manner. But if your students are in teams that are dysfunctional, or just sleepy, their learning can come to a screeching halt as they disengage.

Students put the course content into practice in their team environment where they apply it to bring ideas that matter to them to life. Student teams formed randomly erode the student (and professor!) experience through internal conflict and apathy.

Helping students form high-functioning teams will boost their learning capability exponentially.

We built our concept of high performing teams on the idea of matching students based on aligned goals and diverse skills. We developed our Skills Scavenger Hunt to facilitate that process and thus mitigate the biggest drawbacks of student team projects.

BONUS: This exercise is also an incredible icebreaker, which is critically important to do in an online course environment.

skills scavenger hunt online ice breaker team building animation

In this exercise, students go on a scavenger hunt to find other students with complementary skills in the following categories:

  1. Graphics
  2. Technology
  3. Social Media
  4. Design
  5. Sales
  6. Marketing

Step 1: What Skills Do You Have?

Each student checks any boxes in all 6 areas that are applicable to them. They may be able to check more than one box in a particular area, and they may not be able to check any boxes in a particular area. This doesn’t matter – the goal with this exercise is for students to identify their gaps in skills and fill them with qualified teammates.

Skills scavenger hunt step 1

If students check any boxes for their skills, that particular column will turn dark grey –  to indicate they do not need to add any potential teammate names or notes.

To see the entire Skills Scavenger Hunt Exercise enter your email below!

Get our Next Free Lesson Plan

We email new experiential entrepreneurship lesson plans regularly. Subscribe here to get our next lesson plan in your inbox!

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via 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:

10 Free Tools for Increasing Student Engagement Online

10 Free Tools for Increasing Student Engagement Online

This past spring was a painful experience of online student disengagement. Don’t let that happen this fall!

During the TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Virtual Conference, we presented 10 Tools to Increase Online Student Engagement. During this conference, we asked participant teams of educators to research each tool and write up some notes in a discussion group. This mimics how you might ask student teams to research something and post their findings and recommendations in the discussion board on your LMS.

We used the summaries participants posted as talking points for this post. You can do this with student posts in your LMS by using their posts as talking points about certain topics, so they see their post consumed and shared.

This jigsaw technique is a powerful way to leverage student desire to perform well in front of their peers to move them into deeper engagement in the material.

Below is a video recap of the conference presentation, followed by more detailed information about all 10 tools. You can sprinkle these tools throughout your entrepreneurship syllabus, or stack these tools like building blocks, to create a deeper face-to-face or online student engagement this fall.

#1: GIMKIT

This is an interactive quiz program offering virtual prizes, so students can create their own games or you can create games to deliver interactive learning experiences. When you create a Gimkit, it is basically a quiz that shows up on your students’ phone.

Gimkit - Live Quiz Learning Game

If students answer the question correctly, they receive virtual currency. With this virtual currency, students have the option to buy power-ups. The following are examples of the power-ups available:

  • To receive more currency for correct answers. If they accumulate 10 virtual dollars, they can buy a streak bonus so if they answer multiple questions correctly in a row they earn more virtual currency
  • To get a second chance if they answer incorrectly
  • To get themes to enhance the visual presentation

Gimkit is an amazing gamification experience, which has game mechanics built into a learning experience so students using it will be more bought into the process. Students have various incentives that ignite their natural competitive spirit, which will be very addictive to most of your students, so they just keep playing. And more importantly,

they keep learning while they are playing!

The idea of students creating their own games is another powerful twist to Gimkit. Imagine each student generates their own quiz for an element of the business model canvas. They post a link in the discussion group on your LMS, and then students get to compete with each other and see who understands the various elements of the business model canvas the best by watching the scores within the various games!


To see the 9 other tools that will increase your student engagement this fall with

  • Interactive quizzes and assessment through gaming experiences
  • Virtual collaboration
  • Video discussion and presentation

enter your email below!


Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus

Whether you’re teaching online, face-to-face, or a hybrid or HyFlex model, we built our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) to enable you using tools like those we just reviewed to provide award-winning engagement and excitement for your students

  • in any course structure
  • on every learning management system

Preview ExEC Now


If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person for your entrepreneurship curriculum, including an entrepreneurship syllabus template and 15 weeks of award-winning lesson plans, and don’t want to spend all summer building it:

Consider trying ExEC this Fall.

fall prep with Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
 

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3 Plans You Need for Fall Prep 2020

3 Plans You Need for Fall Prep 2020

Whether you’re teaching online, face-to-face, or a hybrid or HyFlex model, the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC) will enable you to provide award-winning engagement for your students:

  • In a structured, and flexible way
  • That integrates with all major learning management system (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, D2L/Brightspace, Moodle, etc.)

In this environment of uncertainty, you have a chance to innovate the course experience you deliver students. Don’t fall back to the same old entrepreneurship textbook you’ve been using for years – that method won’t give you the flexibility you need to deliver value to your students this fall and to effectively prepare for online, face-to-face, and hybrid-flexible models. 

Fall Prep Options

Online Fall Prep

All classes at all 23 campuses of California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, are moving online for the fall semester. Many schools will likely follow suit eventually, given fears of a COVID-19 second wave.

Even if we start classes in-person, we need a plan to quickly transition our class online if necessary. We built multiple versions of ExEC: one we’ve optimized for teaching in-person, one optimized for hybrid classes, and one optimized for teaching online. Most valuable for your fall prep…

You can seamlessly transition between these version, even mid-term.

We’ve been developing ExEC for the last 5 years and so far it’s…

…while producing outstanding student evaluations

If you’re teaching online this fall, ExEC has you covered!

Online Entrepreneurship Syllabus Structure

Below is a general course structure highlighting the skills students practice at each stage of our online curriculum through highly impactful entrepreneurship activities:

We created an innovative online experience in which students learn these skills that are based on the following foundational experiential learning elements:

  • Asynchronous with multiple touchpoints each week
  • Skills-based
  • Reflection groups

We taught our online version at John Carroll University this past Spring using the same experiential, interactive, approach we use for in-person classes that create meaningful connections between students and professors.

Whether you’re teaching online or face-to-face this fall, you can use ExEC to keep your students engaged in building valuable skills no matter their career path. 

Face-to-Face Fall Prep

The Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum helps your students learn:

  • Idea generation
  • Customer Interviewing
  • Financial modeling
  • MVPs and prototyping
  • Pitching and storytelling

If you meet face-to-face this fall, this curriculum provides 15 weeks of powerful, experiential moments during which students master the above skills through deliberate practice. In addition, students develop a growth mindset, learn to leverage failure, and practice design thinking and business model experimentation.

We iterated ExEC in face-to-face courses at nearly 100 universities for years, so you can feel confident delivering award-winning entrepreneurship activities like the 60 Minute MVP and the Lottery Ticket Dilemma that create the most engaging learning environment available.

But don’t take our word for it . . .

fall prep Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum student testimonial

fall prep faculty Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum faculty testimonial

HyFlex Fall Prep

As a last option, many of us have been told we will be teaching a Hybrid-Flexible (HyFlex) course this fall. This is a new approach for most of us, and that uncertainty can be scary.

Not to fear – we’re developing a version of the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum specifically for this teaching model!

This approach combines some pretty complex technology and pedagogy; HyFlex is a course design in which courses simultaneously combine real-time, in-person classroom interaction with rich on-demand content. 

The underlying design ethos of a HyFlex model is flexibility and student choice. That means ExEC’s award-winning experiential approach is perfect for this particular model!

fall prep hyflex model
Source: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Ready-for-a/248710

Engage Your Students This Fall

Whether you are teaching online, face-to-face, or some version of HyFlex this fall, you can have

More engagement

More structure

More impact

in your entrepreneurship classes. ExEC combines the best practices of entrepreneurship education, and is now used at nearly 100 universities! This entrepreneurship curriculum is chock full of powerful entrepreneurship activities that teach skills entrepreneurs use to build real businesses. 

If you want an engaging approach you can use online or in-person for your entrepreneurship curriculum, and don’t want to spend all summer building it:

Consider trying ExEC this Fall.

fall prep with Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum

If you’d like lesson plans emailed to you directly, subscribe here to get the next one in your inbox.

Join 15,000+ instructors. Get new exercises via email!