ENT 3003 -- Back Stage

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Welcome to the Principles of Entrepreneurship

This site includes exposes everything we try to do in ENT 3003: Principles of Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida. This is the introductory entrepreneurship course for undergraduate students. It is also a very large class -- any given fall and spring semester, there will be about 500 students enrolled, with about 250 students in the summer.

If you've found your way to this site via my chapter in the USASBE annals, welcome. You already have a firm idea of how this class works, and it'll be easy for you to see how the dots connect. If you haven't checked out that chapter, I might encourage you to do that first. A draft of that paper can be found here.

This blog is a work in progress. The table of contents, which is constantly updated, is included directly below.

What you can find here

Weekly exercise schedule. This is the beating heart of the class. In the weekly schedule, you can click through and find all of the exercises students are required to complete in our class. Each exercise is its own post, and each post includes the instructions and the "declaration" text.

Syllabus. All of the exercises, instructions, and due dates are listed in the LMS we use at UF. So I don't feel the need to put together a very detailed printed syllabus. Instead, I use the syllabus to indicate the course and learning objectives as well as to describe the types of exercises students will encounter in the class.

The article that started it all. As a happy coincidence, between the Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 semester, I was asked to write a chapter for the USASBE annals about my teaching approach. Writing this chapter forced me to rethink the way I teach as well as justify (with existing research) some of the methods I had already started using.

The reading list.

Syllabus

Note: This is the recent(ish) syllabus that I'm using for ENT 3003. All of the exercises, instructions, and due dates are already captured in our LMS, so I use the syllabus to list the basic contact information, course description and objectives, and types of exercises students will complete.

Principles of Entrepreneurship

ENT 3003 / Spring 2016

Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center / University of Florida

Instructors: Christopher Pryor, Ph.D.

Head Mentor: Nicholas Mills

Office location: 133M Bryan Hall

E-mail address: cgp@warrington.ufl.edu

Phone: Office: (352) 273-0331

Office Hours: By appointment, gladly!

Text: Entrepreneurship: Theory, Process, Practice, Donald F. Kuratko

Classroom: Heavener 140

Class Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 4:05 – 6 p.m.

Course Description

It’s easy to name them. Steve Jobs. Elon Musk. Oprah Winfrey. Mark Zuckerburg. Richard Branson. The entrepreneurs who have dreamed of a world worth living in and who had the will and perseverance to reality to meet their vision. But what of the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who – although remaining mostly unknown and struggling outside the rapt attention devoted to the famous few – improve their own neighborhoods, churches, cities, schools, and communities through the work of entrepreneurship? They create cool new aps, start after-school programs, and launch local grocery stores, auto garages, and tech companies. They work long hours. They hire employees. They pay taxes. They give back.

Entrepreneurship is found in the story of small victories and local heroes, just as much as it is in the marquee names and headline-grabbing, billion-dollar successes. In this class, we celebrate all of it. During this semester, we will explore and critique and learn about the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. We approach entrepreneurship as a way of thinking and acting, as an attitude and a behavior. Most importantly, we will learn that entrepreneurship is a process, which can be learned, repeated, and applied to any human endeavor.

In this course, you will be asked to be an entrepreneur and develop a concept for a viable, scalable business. You will also be asked to critique – thoughtfully, kindly, but thoroughly – the business concepts of your fellow students. In this class, the memorization of concepts and definitions is eschewed in favor of application, and you will be confronted with real-world situations and other opportunities to actually experience what it means to be an entrepreneur.

Course Objectives

This course is built around a number of core objectives. By the end of the semester, you should be able to:

1. Understand and apply the entrepreneurship process, as well as discern between the different contexts in which the process may unfold, and ways to successfully navigate the process.

2. Demonstrate an ability to distinguish ideas from opportunities and enhance your ability to recognize and evaluate opportunities.

3. Develop a business concept, and critique the viability of your own and others’ business concepts.

4. Demonstrate understanding of the entrepreneurial competencies and how entrepreneurs are different from managers. Moreover, develop and apply these entrepreneurial competencies in this class and in your lives.

Experience Exercises

This class is designed to enable you to begin to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Mindsets – or ways of thinking and acting in the world – aren’t borne through exams, memorization, and multiple-choice quizzes. Mindsets are borne by living through and reflecting on and drawing connections between experiences. In this course, I have devised a series of experience exercises that you may undertake. Each week, several experience exercises will be assigned to you (though you may complete almost all of them in advance). They may loosely be broken down into the following categories, but their purpose is all the same: to get you to start thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur.

Creativity/communication exercises: These exercises are primarily meant to exercise your own creativity and help you acquire practice at communicating your ideas, such as those related to a venture you might start. These exercises are generally worth 1 point each, though some exercises require a bit more input, and these are worth 2 points.

Connection exercises: You will be required to post comments on your fellow students’ blogs. The deadline for you to post these comments will generally be on Thursdays of each week. Completion of these exercises are worth 1 point each.

Reflection exercises. Each week, you will be assigned a reading (or set of readings), and each week, you will write a short reflection on the reading, drawing connections between the reading, your own experiences inside and outside this class, and between your preexisting knowledge of entrepreneurship. Each reflection is worth 1 point.

Competency exercises. There are 13 competencies (or skills) that entrepreneurs tend to be good at. Each week, you will complete an exercise that is designed to help you practice these skills. These exercises are generally worth 2 points each.

The total number of points available through these exercises is 100. In Canvas, instructions and other information for each assignment are written in extensive detail.

Interaction exercises. This semester, we will be using “Yellowdig” as a conversation board inside Canvas. Yellowdig is a cool interface that allows you to share and comment on articles, videos, and other items that are relevant to the course or are interesting to you. We will be using Yellowdig to generate extra credit points in this class. Each post that you make, comment that you write, or “like” that you click will generate a certain number of points. At the end of the semester, these points will be scaled to add extra credit to your final grade in the class. You may earn up to 10 extra credit points in this class via Yellowdig.

The Score Card

Tokens Earned	Equivalent Grade
95	A
90	A-
87	B+
84	B
80	B-
77	C+
74	C
70	C-
67	D+
64	D
60	D-
< 59	E

UF Policies:

University Policy on Accommodating Students with Disabilities: Students requesting accommodation for disabilities must first register with the Dean of Students Office (http ://www .ds o .ufl .edu /drc /). The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the instructor when requesting accommodation. You must submit this documentation prior to submitting assignments or taking the quizzes or exams. Accommodations are not retroactive, therefore, students should contact the office as soon as possible in the term for which they are seeking accommodations.

University Policy on Academic Misconduct: Academic honesty and integrity are fundamental values of the University community. Students should be sure that they understand the UF Student Honor Code at http://www.dso.ufl.edu/students.php.

The Honor Code: We, the members of the University of Florida community, pledge to hold ourselves and our peers to the highest standards of honesty and integrity.

Pledge: On all work submitted for credit by students of the University of Florida, the following pledge is either required or implied: “On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment.”

Please note that violations of this Academic Honor System will not be tolerated. Specifically, I will rigorously pursue incidents of academic dishonesty of any type. Before submitting any work for this class, please read the policies about academic honesty at http://www.dso.ufl.edu/judicial, and ask me to clarify any of its expectations that you do not understand.

Netiquette & Communication Courtesy: All members of the class are expected to follow rules of common courtesy in all email messages, threaded discussions and chats.

Getting Help:

For issues with technical difficulties for the course site or videos, please contact the Technology Assistance Center at: http://warrington.ufl.edu/itsp/techservices/students.asp or call 352-273-0248.

Monday, April 18, 2016

ENT 3003: Weekly Course Schedule (Spring 2016)

Please click on any of the following exercises below. The links will take you to a separate post, which provides the student instructions for each exercise.

Clicking on each link will take you through the course exercises in the order the students see it.

Week 1

No Exercises

USASBE Annals Paper: Teaching the Mega Class

INTRODUCTION

If you were to visit my class – the introductory entrepreneurship course at the University of Florida – you’d feel right at home. The classroom would look about the same as yours: podium up front, tiered seating for about 50. The students would also sound and act the same: highly engaged, with either your lecture or whatever they’re watching on their laptops. However, a few differences would stand out. Your classroom probably doesn’t have five video cameras, run by a dedicated technical director from a hidden control room. Your classroom might not have rows of LED studio lights. You probably don’t have to wear a microphone, and students probably don’t have to speak into a padded, throw-able mic when they ask questions or pose comments. The biggest difference is one you would never notice: most of my students will never come to class at all. Each semester, about 500 students enroll in Principles of Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida, and in-class daily attendance averages about 10 students.

This is the world of the mega-class and of lecture capture, which is a technology that enables faculty to video record their classroom presentations and easily share it, such as through a learning management system like Canvas, Blackboard, or D2L (Owston, Lupshenyuk, & Wideman, 2011). Mega-classes, or classes with 500 or more students, are a growing phenomenon at universities across the country (e.g., Pope, 2007). Lecture capture technology has enabled many more universities to offer mega-classes. The University of Central Florida, for instance, uses lecture capture technology in over 100 courses, some of which have enrollments of a thousand students (Rousson, 2015). At my university, lecture capture is used in the undergraduate business school to teach classes with 2,000 or more students at once, which make my 500-student classes appear puny. Universities are rapidly adopting the mega-class model and lecture capture (Frankel, 2012), and more entrepreneurship educators are likely to find themselves teaching to the digital masses.

When I entered the mega-class world, my intuition was to deploy what had worked so well for me in my previous small liberal arts university: interactive classroom sessions, fostering high student engagement, providing abundant personalized feedback, and having students produce written projects, such as business concepts and plans. (In the mega-class, students who sought feedback were more often than not students who attended the in-class sessions.) In short, I ignored the needs of the 99 percent of students watching online and taught to the students in the class. And no surprise: end-of-the-semester feedback was unpleasant. Something had to change.

This chapter is a summary of everything I learned and implemented while teaching in the mega-class environment. The outline of this chapter is as follows. First, I will describe the challenges – as well as resources – that are unique to the mega-class. Second, I will introduce an instructional framework that I have used to revise my own mega-class. Third, using the entrepreneurship course I have developed at the University of Florida as an example, I will describe several practices entrepreneurship instructors can use to provide a top-notch experiential journey to their own students. I hope that the lessons I have learned in the mega-classroom can also be applied by instructors of small classes, and that you find something useful here to help you more fully deliver on the promise of entrepreneurship education.

MATTERS OF SIZE: THE PROBLEMS AND BENEFITS OF THE MEGA-CLASS

The challenges of the mega-class. Let’s say you are one student enrolled in a 500- or 1,500-person entrepreneurship class. You may be a freshman, and the sheer scale of the class shocks you, compared to the small classes at your high school (Mulryan-Kyne, 2010). You quickly determine that nobody knows you are in class or cares to know your name. You feel disengaged (Exeter et al., 2010): disengaged from the instructor, disengaged from your fellow students, and disengaged from the course content. This disengagement can lead you to believe that you are anonymous, that your presence in the class is not valued, and that you can simply ‘disappear’ without any consequences (e.g., Gibbs, 1992). As you choose to skip class more frequently – after all, who will notice? – your performance edges downward (e.g., Marburger, 2001). What’s worse, your instructors, who are simply following following well-meaning research (e.g., Terry et al., 2015) and advice from colleagues, dedicate themselves to delivering “engaging lectures,” since that’s what makes a “great” mega-class experience. Although you may think lectures are drudgery, the alternative, classroom engagement, is actually more painful for you to watch. Discussion sessions, in-class breakouts and group work don’t lead to stimulating video and leave you feeling further alienated from the class.

You are now the entrepreneurship instructor. One of the first mega-class challenges that confront you is logistical. For instance, administering and quickly grading exams, quizzes, and other assignments pose serious challenges. To cope, you find yourself increasingly relying on multiple-choice exams and other non-written assignments (Bean, 2001), adversely affecting the learning potential in the course (Cuseo, 2007). Providing individualized, substantive student feedback is practically impossible. In fact, research suggests that large classes foster an environment inimical to interactions between instructors and students – instead, culture imbues a message of “You leave me alone and I will leave you alone” (Kuh et al., 1991: 362). What’s worse, you find that your large class size destroys the quality of the learning your students acquire. Class-size appears to be inversely related to students’ development of cognitive skills as larger classes tend to focus on the rote memorization of facts rather than higher-order objectives, such as analysis or application or synthesis (e.g., Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). Throughout the semester, as fewer and fewer students choose to attend the in-person session of your mega-class (Cuseo, 2007), you may become discouraged and burned out, which further reduces the potential for students’ learning outcomes (e.g., Roeser et al., 2013).

In any classroom, these dynamics would be serious impediments to learning. In an entrepreneurship classroom, they are disastrous. The fundamental insight of research is that entrepreneurship is a process, which can be learned through practice (Corbett, 2005; Drucker, 1985; Kuratko, 2005). And, perhaps unlike other disciplines found on the university campus, entrepreneurship students cannot practice their discipline by listening to lectures recorded on a video camera, taking multiple choice tests, and offering a rote comment or two in an online discussion board with other students.

We learn what we do. Like the question Postman and Weingartner (1969) posed decades ago: we have to wonder what entrepreneurship students in mega-classes might actually be learning. They are not learning the content that we teach in lectures. Memorized definitions of “opportunity” or the steps of the entrepreneurship process are quickly forgotten after the final exam. However, our inability to engage students, our exclusive focus on lower-order memorization and comprehension skills, the absence of practice, our overreliance on the lecture, and the lack of any feedback does teach entrepreneurship students in mega-classes some important lessons:

· Entrepreneurship is easy. Entrepreneurship is acing two multiple choice exams and a comprehensive final.

· Entrepreneurship is about me. I’ve written a one-page business concept or I’ve presented an elevator pitch. I wasn’t required to interview customers or understand market conditions – my ideas came entirely from my own head. Entrepreneurship is a lot like the creative writing course I took as a freshman.

· Entrepreneurship ends when the class ends. I was “delivered” all of the content in the course through a series of lectures, and once I listened to all of the lectures and completed all of the exams, I knew everything I needed to know.

· It is the instructor’s job to make me an entrepreneur. I have no responsibility in leading my own learning experiences.

· Any feedback I receive will be rare and it will be positive. My fellow students were very supportive of my ideas, in online discussion boards, and I never received any individualized feedback from the instructor.

In short, the mega-class can hamstring any entrepreneur instructor’s efforts and hamper our students’ development of an entrepreneurial mindset.

Resources at hand. Although the mega-class imposes a number of serious challenges, it is also accompanied by a number of resources, which the instructor can deploy. Ironically, many of the disadvantages of the mega-class can also be important resources for the entrepreneurship instructor, if recognized and used appropriately. The first resource is class size: although the individual instructor may be unable to directly connect with a large, diverse group of students, students can connect with each other. For instance, the use of peer assessment, which is the use of students to evaluate each other’s work (e.g., Weaver & Cotrell, 1986), is increasingly seen as an important means of cultivating higher-order cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and analyzing information (Dochy, Segers, & Sluijsmans, 1999). The mega-class and its huge, diverse student population has the potential to expose individual learners to perspectives and information that would be unavailable in a smaller class, with its relatively homogeneous population. The second resource is technology: the technological wave that made the modern mega-class possible also enables instructors to develop a vibrant, engaging learning experience for students (e.g., Grossman & Means, 2014). For instance, students’ ability to create and customize their own blogs helps them create their own “seat” in the classroom, from which they may connect with other students and engage in their learning experiences (Kop, 2011). In addition, learning management systems, more often than not used by instructors to bludgeon students with either more content, communication, testing, or grades (Siemens, 2007), can instead be a powerful tool to stimulate student engagement, create interconnectivity, and curate students’ work.

Other resources at the mega-class instructor’s disposal, but which are not unique to their context, would be the centers for teaching at our universities, faculty and administrative support, and the growing online communities dedicated to developing and spreading teaching techniques that are becoming increasingly necessary in our simultaneously digitalized and individualized world. One resource I deliberately do not mention is the instructor herself, specifically the pervasive notion that an engaging, passionate instructor is needed to carry the attention of the hundreds of students in a mega-class. Perhaps this advice is particularly common among entrepreneurship instructors because our field is inspirational and listening to successful entrepreneurs can be engaging. The suggestions I make in the following sections are based on our current understanding and research of how learning happens, which necessarily emphasizes “student-centered” learning.

DEFINING THE ‘FIRST PRINCIPLES’ OF INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

In entrepreneurship, it is a truth universally acknowledged that experience is the foundation of learning (Corbett, 2007; Krueger, 2007; Kuratko, 2005). The experiences entrepreneurs have shape who they are (Morris, Pryor, & Schindehutte, 2012). Therefore, if we want to foster an entrepreneurial mindset in our learners, our course design must place tremendous emphasis on shaping learners’ experiences (Kickul & Fayole, 2007). The experiential learning model (e.g., Kolb & Kolb, 2005) has been integral in guiding our shift from lecture-based, didactic methods of instruction to student-centered, action-oriented methods; nevertheless, this model, while effective at describing how learners learn, is less applicable when considering how teachers should teach. For that perspective, we draw on Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction (2002), which provides explicit guidelines for instructional design that harness and enhance learners’ experiences. Additionally, although generally applicable, Merrill’s framework has been used to explore design issues related to teaching large classes (e.g., Margaryan et al., 2015; Tolley, Johnson, & Koszalka, 2012).

Merrill draws on a wide range of existing instructional design theories to coalesce five principles. The implementation of these principles in course design is positively related to the amount of learning in that course, he argues (2002). Before designing the entrepreneurship mega-class, instructional guidelines are important. As these principles are (a) applicable to any learning setting and (b) extrapolated from the commonalties among a broad array of existing instructional design models, I have used them to design my course. The principles, which are shown in the circle embedded in Figure 1, are described below.

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Insert Figure 1 about here

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1. Problem Centered. Learning will increase when students are engaged in solving real-world problems. Problems are defined as “a wide range of activities, with the most critical characteristics being that the activity is some whole task rather than only components of a task and that the task is representative of those the learner will encounter in the world following instruction” (Merrill, 2002: 45). (This may appear obvious, but many of us are teaching courses based on the sequence of chapters in a book or based on a conceptual framework, such as the entrepreneurship process. The real-world applicability of entrepreneurship can be lost in the jumble of frameworks and concepts, which are often presented before students have had a chance to experience them.) Problem-centered instruction emphasizes the relevance of the course to students’ lives (e.g., Postman & Weingartner, 1969) as well as recognizes that unless students are able to anchor frameworks and concepts with real-life problems and situations, they quickly forget (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014). In addition, students should be presented with a progression of problems, each of which add complexity and each of which are explicitly built on the experiences of the preceding problems.

2. Activation of experience. The acquisition of new knowledge is aided when learners are able to connect it to previous experiences (Merrill, 2002). This principle contrasts against the practice of introducing abstract concepts to students, who may not have the experience basis with which to interpret and make sense of abstract information. Importantly, if learners do not have adequate experience it is incumbent upon the instructor to provide that experience. This is particularly important for the undergraduate entrepreneurship instructor. While we may be able to discuss, abstractly, notions of an entrepreneurship process or describe the competencies most important to entrepreneurs, our students are not likely to have experience with skills, such as risk mitigation or guerilla thinking (e.g., Morris et al., 2013), which can hamper our ability to inculcate this knowledge. Activation also involves the stimulation of mental models or abstract frameworks to assimilate students’ experiences as knowledge. For entrepreneurship, these mental models might include the entrepreneurship process or the business model canvas.

3. Demonstration. Show, don’t tell. When instructors demonstrate the skills they want their students to acquire – as opposed to telling them information – learning is enhanced (Merrill, 2002). The underlying notion is that if students are shown how the information they are being taught can apply to specific problems, they are more likely to find relevance in the information and retain it (Margaryan et al., 2015). Effective demonstration would show both bad examples and good examples of the practice. For instance, if teaching students how to talk to customers, it would be important to show them the incorrect ways of interviewing customers alongside the correct ways. Effective use of the demonstration principle also involves task progression. For instance, students are presented with a real-world objective that must be completed. Then, in a progression, students are presented with a sequence of tasks that lead to the completion of the objective. Effective progressions run through simple tasks to complex tasks, to reduce students’ cognitive load (Merrill, 2007). Finally, pare down your demonstrations – simple and precise is more effective than effulgent and mellifluous. Over-complex media can compete with students’ attention and distract them from the demonstration.

4. Application. Students who practice using the information and skills they have acquired learn more than students that do not (Merrill, 2002). The positive effect of practice, especially regular, distributed practice (as opposed to practice lumped all together at the same time – such as cramming) has been firmly linked to learning (Cepeda et al., 2006). To promote learning, courses should be designed in a way that afford students many opportunities to practice the skills they have been told about, these opportunities should be frequent and consistent with learning objectives. When preparing a series of practice opportunities, instructors should plan to focus more time coaching earlier and reduce their support as students acquire more practice (Merrill, 2002). At the same time, instructors should not stifle their students with coaching and support: students who are granted room to make errors tend to learn more effectively, especially when they are provided feedback on their practice efforts (e.g., Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012). Finally, to follow this principle means providing students with varied practice, rather than simply repeating the same task. Students who have varied practice develop fuller understanding of the conceptual dimensions of a skill and are better able to apply the skill in different situations (Kerr & Booth, 1978).

5. Integration. This principle could also be internalization, reflection, or personalization. Merrill’s (2002) fifth principle suggests that when students adopt a skill as their own, they augment their learning. To facilitate the integration of new skills, students may demonstrate their newly acquired skills to friends and peers, they may reflect, either to themselves or by sharing with others, and they may recombine their new skills with other skills in their repertoire to “create” new skills and enlarge their knowledge and abilities. For instance, reflection, which occurs as we mull over past experiences, discuss those experiences with others, or meditate on those experiences, is an important but frequently overlooked element of course design (e.g., Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 2013). Importantly, reflection strengthens students’ acquisition of knowledge through retrieval or recalling past learning, which reinforces the information in students’ memory (Brown et al., 2014), and students’ reflection transforms new information by attaching personal meaning to it and incorporating it into their existing mental frameworks.

FROM PRINCIPLES TO PRACTICE IN THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP MEGA-CLASS

The instructor’s close adherence to these principles and a clear vision of the course objectives – together with appropriate practices and a deft use of resources at hand – can result in an amazingly engaging course and a fruitful learning experience. Below, I describe a number of the practices I use to implement the first principles. These practices are pragmatic approaches I have adopted to provide a series entrepreneurship experience for my students toward fostering an entrepreneurial mindset. I describe how each practice helps me overcome the challenges related to teaching the mega-class, as well as how they enable me to fulfill the principles. The field in Figure 1 displays how each practice aligns with the principles and provides descriptions of how each practice aligns with each principle.

Micro-exercises: We learn what we do, one step at a time

Glance through the syllabi of many entrepreneurship courses, and a particular trend emerges: assignments tend to be few in number and require significant effort. For instance, students may be teamed to write a business plan through the course of a single semester. Elsewhere, a class may require students, in teams again, to produce a case analysis and presentation, take three exams, and write a comprehensive business model. Repetition of any of these exercises in a single course is rare, to students’ detriment. Empirical evidence on how we learn points to the usefulness of repeated and varied practice (e.g., Brown et al., 2014), the power of leaving time between exercises to stimulate forgetting (e.g., Carey, 2014), and reflection (Boud et al., 2013). In other words, rather than major, one-time exercises, it could be better to break exercises into smaller pieces and incorporate repetition.

In my course, I have doubled down on the notion of regular practice. Student make not one elevator pitch but four (and they are also asked to provide feedback on others’ pitches as well as reflect on how they improved their own pitch over time); students produce four descriptions of a business concept over a semester, not one (again, with feedback and reflection in between); and students interview five potential customers a week over three weeks (with feedback and reflection). While implementing our best current understanding of how students learn, this practice is also practically necessary in a mega-class. Exercises that are complex and multi-faceted tend to require careful instructor attention and feedback along the way, else the exercise loses its effectiveness and students become frustrated. In the mega-class, one instructor simply does not have the capacity to monitor the progression of hundreds of business plans, business model canvases, or market analyses. However, many of these complex entrepreneurial behaviors may be broken into pieces (e.g., Pryor et al., in press), which can be made into simple micro-exercises and practiced. The exercises are simple enough that students are able to achieve them and are also able to provide feedback and suggestions to their peers.[1] Students write reports on their experiences for each exercise and post them to personal blogs they create for the course.

Using micro-exercises enables me to achieve several of the first principles: problem-centering, activation, application, and integration. Problem-centering. Entrepreneurship educators are lucky that compared to other academic fields, their students are clearly and actively engaged in solving real-world problems. In outlining instructions for each exercise, care should be given to explicitly describing how the exercise applies to the student’s journey toward the entrepreneurial mindset. Activation. Students coming into an introductory entrepreneurship course do not often have the requisite experiences to activate, so these experiences must be provided to them, which I do through the micro-exercises. Aristotle said that we learn what we do, and the exercises I include are those that entrepreneurs might reasonably do. That includes, for instance, looking for and conceptualizing opportunities, developing networks, speaking with customers and potential investors, and even failing. That does not tend to include case analyses, exams, and quizzes. Application. This fundamental understanding of experiential learning – that the content, concepts, and frameworks of entrepreneurship are better understood when they are experienced than when they are discussed in a lecture – requires the application of knowledge to address real-world problems. Additionally, incorporating repeated and varied micro-exercises provides students a chance to practice what they have learned, which is central to application. Integration. Students’ blog posts reporting on their completion of exercises always include a component that asks them to reflect on what they learned, what part of the exercise was surprising to them, and what they will change the next time they undertake the exercise.

Student blogs : Recreating and turbo-charging the ‘seat’

Students in my course are required to create personal blogs during the first week of class. They submit the web addresses to their blogs to me, and I input them into a class blog directory, which I post to our LMS. Students use the blogs to “hand in” all of their assignments, which I call experience reports. Each experience report is published to their blog as an individual post. Many (or all) of these posts are shared with other students in the class, who are asked to read and provide evaluative feedback via comments on the blog post.

In any small class, or even larger classes that do not use lecture capture technology, students take their seats in the room or auditorium. They actually have presence in the classroom, and may, from their seat, engage in the lessons presented each day. In the mega-class, where lectures are often recorded to be watched later, students have no classroom presence. As I describe above, the lack of students’ presence in mega-classes harms engagement and negatively effects learning outcomes. Students’ use of blogs, in lieu of a seat in an actual classroom, can give them a sense of presence in the classroom. Their blog is their seat, and because they have much more personal control and ownership of their blog than they do a seat in a classroom, blogs can actually increase students’ sense of engagement and belonging in the class (e.g., Kerawalla et al., 2009). The sense of engagement can be further enhanced through the network-creating potential of using student blogs. For instance, in my course, which has an average enrollment of 500 a semester, students are located all over the country and the world. Providing a blog directory and asking students to read each other’s posts and comment on them exposes them to a huge array of student experiences (Kop, 2011), which is not possible in a smaller class. Finally, the students are undertaking the same journey together and describing their experiences in completing the same exercises through their blogs. Sharing each other’s experience can recreate, on a smaller scale, the actions and interactions that are essential to the entrepreneurship experience (e.g., Venkataraman et al., 2012).

Blogs enable instructors to meet several of the first principles, especially demonstration and integration. Demonstration. In an entrepreneurship course, students may be required to interview customers or present an elevator pitch or even present a case. The instructor may demonstrate these activities in their lectures or by showing recordings online of others’ demonstrations. However, blogs harness the amazing creative output of the mega-class. Suddenly, a student can record their interview with a potential customer, post it on YouTube, and share it in a blog post. Next, hundreds of other students are able to see the interview and using a rubric that I have provided in lecture or in the LMS, they assess for themselves the good aspects and poorer aspects of the interview. Not only is the instructor responsible for demonstrating the entrepreneurship-relevant tasks, but students also demonstrate their performance of the tasks, too. Integration. Blogs create a space for students to discuss their experiences in the course, describe and defend the actions they took to achieve a task, and reflect on what they learned. I require students to keep their blogs public and encourage them to comment on each other’s posts. Moreover, blogs tell a story over time, and each new post is located alongside the subsequent posts. A student’s individual experiences come together to form a cohesive whole, and each exercise is described by the student and read by other students in the context of each students’ journey through the entire course.

Peer feedback: Leveraging the mega-class’s most abundant resource

The primary challenge in a mega-class is the student-faculty ratio: there are hundreds of students for only one instructor. The odds are against any instructor providing substantive one-on-one student feedback. However, the practices of using blogs and micro-exercises (a) enables students to comment on other’s exercise experiences and (b) keeps the exercises simple enough that students can provide valuable feedback to each other. Peer feedback is not only a practical solution to a mega-class problem – it works, too. For instance, research has shown that students’ performance after receiving a variety of peer feedback from multiple students increases more than when they receive feedback from a single instructor (Cho & MacArthur, 2010). Moreover, students’ provision of feedback has also been found to have learning benefits (Nicol, Thomson, & Breslin, 2014). Providing and receiving feedback is also a critical task in entrepreneurship (e.g., Haynie, Shepherd, & Patzelt, 2012). Taken together, the learning benefits alone warrant the use of peer feedback in the entrepreneurship mega-class, aside from practical considerations.

Peer feedback also delivers on the first principles of activation and integration. Activation. Compelling students to provide feedback on several students’ experience reports presents them with alternative perspectives on an experience they all share, which can help students develop abstract understandings or schemas, which is a facet of activation (Margaryan et al., 2015). Feedback also takes place within the context of practice: students report on an experience exercise, receive feedback from students, and are able to put that feedback to use in subsequent exercises. Integration. The learning benefits of peer feedback occur as students evaluate others’ work and provide support and suggestions for improvement, which can reinforce their own understanding of the exercise (Cho & Cho, 2011). In addition, students reflect on their own experiences to provide feedback to their peers, which further supports integration.

Drop the mic, really: Keeping the lecture short and practical

The ratings are in, and they aren’t great: if you are the instructor in a mega-class using lecture capture, you have about 6 minutes before your students stop watching (Guo, Kim, & Rubin, 2014). If you are instead lecturing to a room of hundreds, the numbers are not much better in terms of attention and knowledge retention. When I began teaching a mega-class using, I treated the course like an in-person class with an out-of-sight, out-of-mind online component. Out came our usual bag of tricks: short lectures, break-out groups, lots of student interaction and participation. All captured in one 1-hour, 50-minute video. The in-class experience was wonderful (at least, I perceived it to be wonderful), but it was miserable to watch online. And eventually, very few students were.

Evidence suggests that effective recorded lectures are short, practical, and demonstrative (e.g., Bates, 2005; Guo et al., 2014). Merrill’s first principles also suggests an instructional role for demonstration, which such lectures can fulfill. In my mega-class, I now record “How To” videos for each exercise students are asked to complete. These videos’ explicit purpose is to demonstrate the skill students should learn, and I try to include good and bad examples of the skill applied. For instance, for a “How To” video on elevator pitches, I asked a student entrepreneur who had obtained national attention for his elevator pitch to make an in-class demonstration; I also asked a student who was involved in a start-up, but still a novice, to make a demonstration of his pitch. The video concluded with my extemporaneous discussion of the differences between the two pitches as well as a short run-down of elevator pitch “best practices.” I also record short segments that present abstract concepts and frameworks in entrepreneurship. This content is presented as a ‘road-map’ for students, and their intent is to provide students with interpretive frameworks, which they can use to meaningfully understand their experiences and place them within the broader entrepreneurship context (i.e., the principle of activation).

Hack the LMS: A practicality of the experience-driven mega-class

One consequence of (a) breaking larger exercises into micro-exercise and (b) giving students a chance to repeat exercises several times in order to practice is that there are a lot of opportunities for students to earn points. In my course, there are 77 columns in my gradebook. If you visit the blog (ent3003backstage.blogspot.com), which I have created for entrepreneurship instructors and which is based on my class, you can see the variety of exercises students perform. The second, more important consideration of providing students ample opportunity to practice is that they will improve as they perform each task. Lots of theoretical and empirical research has been conducted on what is known as the growth mindset – or one’s belief that one’s intelligence and skills can improve over time (as opposed to remaining more-or-less fixed) (Dweck, 2006). This means that student performance on early tasks will tend to be weaker than on later tasks. Together with the consideration that entrepreneurs learn from failure (e.g., Kuratko, 2014), it seems inappropriate to grade students harshly for poor performance early in a series of tasks. Therefore, I mostly designate 1 point for all exercises in the class, with a few more onerous tasks worth 2 points: in other words, if students complete the task, they earn the point. The purpose is to reward students for their practice and accumulation of experience rather than reward them for achieving a task the way I think they ought to or by measuring them against some moving, arbitrary classroom distribution.

On grading. Simplifying grading in a class with 500 students who must complete 77 tasks still means making 38,500 entries in a gradebook. Even if I had the time to do this, logging students’ points is a much less effective use of my time than generating feedback, curating content, and providing enthusiastic support. This is where your LMS can come in handy. Simply have the students log their own points.[2] In my course, for instance, I have created 77 quizzes in our LMS, each with one question (or “Declaration”). I simply ask the student whether they have completed each exercise, met all of the requirements detailed in the instructions, and whether they published their report to their blog. If the student marks “True” in the quiz, the LMS automatically logs the point. If the student has not completed the exercise, they simply do not take the quiz, and the LMS assigns a zero once the deadline expires. For two exercises a week, I also require students to upload (or “Share”) the URL to a particular blog post they have written in the LMS. Using the peer evaluation function, our LMS will randomly assign that URL to students in the class, who are then asked to write comments and feedback on the posts they are assigned. D2L and Blackboard also provide similar peer evaluation functions.

The initial concern any instructor might have before implementing such a system would be that students might claim points for exercises they did not complete. That has not been my experience. Three things keep students honest: (a) there is the promise of peer evaluation, when other students will be able to read and comment on posts, (b) the blogs they create are public, and I upload a Class Blog Directory at the beginning of the semester, and (c) many exercises require students to upload a video of themselves (e.g., doing an elevator pitch). Indeed, the case could be made that students are much less likely to cheat in this system than they would during a high-stakes exam, when they might be one of 500 or more anonymous faces in an auditorium, and you’re the only proctor. The second concern an instructor might have simply the lack of any evaluative grading and assessment. That is, how can we know students are learning if we aren’t actually critiquing their work and adjusting points on each assignment? Abundant research suggests that traditional grading is actually harmful to the learning process (please see Carey & Carifio, 2012; Kohn, 1999, 2011; McMorran, Ragupathi, & Luo, in press). Research and empirical evidence suggests that grades reduce students’ interest in learning, reduce students’ risk propensity in approaching assignments, and reduce the quality of their thinking. However, the alternative system used in my course is informed by current assessment and learning theory, and it is a powerful means for achieving the following:

· Instructors are freed to provide true experience and true practice to their students. In the mega-class, freedom from the gradebook can also afford the instructor time to enhance more important aspects of the class, such as the nature and progression of the micro-exercises and the content of the short lectures.

· Students are afforded room to fail. And if they miss one exercise, there are other opportunities for them to practice the task.

· Students are treated like adults – they are responsible for their own grades and their progression through the class – truly a student- and action-centered classroom.

· Students are actually exposed to entrepreneurship experiences. Although the question of “how many experiences does it take to foster an entrepreneurial mindset” has not been answered in research, the answer is much more likely to be 77 (or beyond) rather than 4 (e.g., case analysis, two exams, and the production of a business model canvas).

FROM BIG TO SMALL TO SMALLER

Each week I put on the microphone and step in front of the cameras and the bright lights to talk to hundreds of students at once. Rather than channeling Charles Kingsfield, the anxiety-producing professor in The Paper Chase, I’m aiming for Jim Nantz, the CBS sports broadcaster and play-by-play analyst. If I have done my job right and followed the principles and practices that I have described above, my students are already on the path toward an entrepreneurship mindset before I ever speak a word. My job is mostly that of the sports analyst when the game, or journey, is in progress: to describe how each student’s experiences fit within the broader context of entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurship process, and to give them a few of the tools they need to succeed on their journey.

With a compass of instructional principles firmly in hand, the instructor’s next course of action is to start thinking small and get out of the way. Micro-exercises. Mini-lectures. Earn 1 point here, another there. Outline the students’ path toward an entrepreneurial mindset – and always be there to help – but always remember that it’s the students’ journey and not yours. Going forward, I anticipate the possibility of introducing some of these techniques in smaller classes. My initial challenge was to scale up, but on reflection, I suspect that these principles and practices can scale down, too. I’m excited about the small-class possibilities of micro-exercises, of providing students ample opportunity to practice tasks, and of setting them down new paths to develop their own entrepreneurial mindset.

REFERENCES

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[1] You may access and use all of the exercises I have used in the Principles of Entrepreneurship course at ent3003backstage.blogspot.com. I have also provided other information, such as a course outline, syllabus, and reading list, which you may use. Many of the exercises were developed with the help of materials provided by Dr. Alex Bruton and Diana Kander.

[2] I learned of this practice from Prof. Laura Gibbs, who teaches literature at the University of Oklahoma. Her blog, which provides much more detail about this technique and others, can be found at anatomy.lauragibbs.net.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Welcome to the Principles of Entrepreneurship

Table of Contents

What you can find here

Syllabus

Monday, April 18, 2016

ENT 3003: Weekly Course Schedule (Spring 2016)

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Week 13

Week 14

Week 15

USASBE Annals Paper: Teaching the Mega Class