Join the Revolution – Teach Entrepreneurship With ExEC This Fall
You’re exhausted and looking forward to a break – it’s the end of the semester. We get that.
Before you turn to summer research and vacation plans, I urge you to think about your fall courses. Bookstores want to know what resources you’re using. Don’t wait until “later this summer” to plan them – you’ll keep delaying it and end up scrambling to tweak your courses a week or two before the semester starts. That’s not fair to you or your students.
Don’t reinvent the wheel, let ExEC take the stress out of your planning, while making your class even more engaging. Sign up now!
We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback from students and faculty, and we have grown from no schools adopting ExEC to almost 50 schools adopting it in less than 2 years. Join the revolution!
Our professors get really excited:
Dr. Susan Cohen
Assistant Professor of Management, The University of Georgia
“Today I fell in love. In love with the problem validation presentation and all of the hard work the students put into (in)validating their customers, channels and problem statements.”
Jonathan York
Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Cal Poly State University
“I have to be careful with my compliments or you’ll get a big head, and I’m only one week in, but I am thoroughly impressed and enjoying the course. The structure of ExEC was ideal for allowing me to fill in all of the accumulated wisdom and approaches that I have been using over 10 years.”
Our students also speak to their satisfaction with the curriculum, and also to the practicality of the experience:
“I think this course teaches more practical skills which are not available in other courses during college.” – Student, Georgia State University
“I really enjoyed how involved the learning in this class was, instead of reading straight from a textbook.” – Student, Susquehanna University
“I enjoyed the interactive class that we had as opposed to lecture. It gets everyone involved and awake and gets the juices flowing in your brain. Class was more enjoyable rather than something I had to attend.” – Student, Rowan University
Can You Engage More of your Students?
There is always room to improve our students’ experience. Just like Georgann Jouflas at Colorado Mesa University, now is your chance to rediscover the excitement of teaching entrepreneurship.
She was looking for a curriculum through which her students could learn the skills an entrepreneur uses to build something someone wants. She found that in our award-winning Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum (ExEC).
Fall is coming. Choose your curriculum now, then enjoy your summer. ExEC is the curriculum your students need.
We’ll explain more about ExEC, but first, remember that we are hosting a FREE virtual workshop to train you on how to engage ALL your students next semester. Head here for details and to register.
Why ExEC?
Last week we talked about why textbooks don’t work. If you’re looking for a structured way to make your class real from day one, that engage your students without using textbooks, try ExEC. We built a blend of digital (for resources and assignments) and real-life learning experiences, and practice what we preach by interviewing our faculty and students, so we are continuously improving the experience for you and for your students.
Learn more about our curriculum from this review in Academy of Management Learning & Education.
Our Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum focuses on a few core topics that are essential to entrepreneurs:
Our founding team are entrepreneurs. We’ve spent years interviewing entrepreneurship faculty and students. This combined knowledge led us to build an evolving, award-winning entrepreneurship curriculum that probes topics in-depth that entrepreneurship textbooks gloss over.
When we cover a topic, such as financial modeling, we don’t stop at providing context and information. In this case, we lead students through an experimentation process so they can discover a financially sustainable business model. Along the way, they discover the most important elements of a rigorous financial projection.
We also include curated Resource Guides for dozens of topics we do not cover. We continuously update our Resource Guides just as we do the exercises and lesson plans. This is quite valuable for students, who have lifetime access to ExEC, as they navigate their entrepreneurial path post-college and find the need for this information. Professors and students can take a much deeper dive into a variety of topics such as:
- Types of Entrepreneurship
- Financials
- Team Formation
- Legal Issues
It’s important that students have this information at their fingertips. But this information should not be the core of any entrepreneurship course. The experience should be!
Structured Experiential Learning
Georgann Jouflas, one of our early adopter professors at Colorado Mesa University, mentions:
“I love the Teaching Entrepreneurship (ExEC) curriculum because it has that background reading information, easily accessible, easily assignable. But I love the experiential part of it.”
We engage students in practicing skills, actively. Class time should be spent learning by doing, with professors guiding students through an experience where they can see the material come to life in a way that is meaningful for them. We built that experience for you, for your students. ExEC enables professors to easily shift from the ineffective sage-on-the-stage model of education to the guide-on-the-side model, because the real teacher with the ExEC curriculum is the students’ experience.
As Mike Dominik, one of our early adopter professors at Rowan University, mentions, he values the practical nature of the curriculum, and that we keep it relevant:
We built ExEC as a progression of deep learning activities to encourage an understanding of information through active problem-solving and iterative skill development. This curriculum sits upon a strong foundation of the work of David Kolb and colleagues that shows that students learn best through experience. It also harkens way back to a timeless quote from Xun Kuang in the 3rd Century B.C.E.:
“Tell me and I forget,
teach me and I may remember,
engage me and I learn.”
As Georgann Jouflas explained, she wanted to teach her students how to discover their passion and how to solve problems, not just work with ideas. Her students needed to deeply engage with understanding the power of hidden assumptions, and how to prototype. A textbook didn’t address her need, but ExEC did!
Textbooks don’t work; they become outdated very quickly, so information students are learning can be irrelevant. Once students purchase a textbook, that is the resource they have – it doesn’t change. The ExEC curriculum is a living, breathing resource; once students purchase ExEC they have lifetime access, so as we update the curriculum to meet the current reality, the resource at students’ disposal stays current.
ExEC is the entire learning experience, giving students meaningful content and the tools to turn that content into action.
Don’t worry about covering every topic in a particular niche of entrepreneurship. Invite students into an experience. They will thank you. Don’t take our word for it – check out any of the almost 50 universities using our curriculum. Dr. Chris Welter, who has used ExEC with undergrads and MBAs at Xavier University, says:
“It’s the software I’ve been looking for for 3 or 4 years . . . I really appreciate the ability for students to get their hands dirty.”
Engage your Students this Fall
If you want your entrepreneurship classroom buzzing with the nervousness and excitement of active learning . . .
You are not alone.
There’s a community of entrepreneurial professors like you, and they’re using ExEC to bring entrepreneurship to life for their students. Request your preview today to get a jump on your fall courses.
Try the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum
Request a preview of ExEC today and make this Fall the most engaging semester of entrepreneurship yet! Our curriculum is full of experiential exercises that will make your students’ learning come alive.
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:
- Textbooks Don’t Work. Textbooks are not an effective way to teach entrepreneurship. Experiences are. Students don’t want to read. They want to do. Engage students with the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.
- Teaching Finance in Entrepreneurship. Finance is a difficult subject to teach in entrepreneurship. Our financial projection simulator is the best way to teach financial projections without overwhelming students.
- Student Engagement Workshop. In this hour-long session, you will learn 4 techniques to engage all your students – those who are there to learn, and those who are there to pass!
Want More Tools To Engage Your Students?
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