Teaching Entrepreneurship: Designing the Educational Experience
As promised in the last post, I am back! In this post, I will talk about designing the educational experience for a school student eager to learn about Entrepreneurship.
You all must have heard ongoing debates about which form of education is the best. The MOST COMMON debate I have witnessed on this topic is the one on “Online v/s Offline Education”. Many people feel that online education is reducing kids’ ability to think. But there are many other people who feel that the current model of offline school education restricts learning within the four walls of the classroom.
I have a very objective opinion on this though. Both online and offline learning have their own advantages and disadvantages. What if we can devise a teaching method which incorporates the best of online and offline learning.
Wait! Before you start thinking that we are on the brink of a discovery here, I would like to stop you. This teaching method already exists and is called blended learning. It combines the best of online learning with traditional classroom methods. But why is it needed? Aren’t online courses self-sufficient?
Online courses are great! They have expanded the reach of quality education beyond geographical barriers. But if you add a more personal touch to it, a human element, the learning experience becomes that much more magical. Online courses facilitated by qualified educators drive much better engagement in terms of activity based learning and feedback they get.
That is why we use blended learning as our teaching method for teaching Entrepreneurship to school students. Our online course on Entrepreneurship is used as a tool by the facilitators to enhance their learning experience.
We implement the blended learning method through this three step teaching model:
- Relate: The first few classes are used to establish the presence of the facilitator. We start by telling them about the reason of why this course is being taught. Then we discuss about the problems they face, the problems they’ve solved, and the entrepreneurs they admire. This helps to create a personal connection between the facilitators and the students.
- Narrate: Human beings are wired to tell and enjoy stories. Stories make learning stick to your brain. That’s why we use stories of highly successful entrepreneurs (like the story of Elon Musk) to show them how they did it. This helps them to learn the fundamental principles of entrepreneurship in an engaging way.
- Demonstrate: We use our online course on Entrepreneurship to equip them with the basic knowledge required to create a value offering and then to guide them step wise on how to do it. Each video essentially describes a step in the process of value creation. Once a video is shown, we test the theoretical learning through interactive formative assessments and then we move on to actually perform that step with the students. This way, they not only learn by seeing but they also learn by doing.
Now that we know how to teach Entrepreneurship to school students, we should think about the “why”. Why do we teach Entrepreneurship to them?
As I especially highlighted in the last post, we should not expect the next billion dollar business to come out of this course. Our learning goal in this course is to teach them team work, problem solving, resilience, iteration and hard work. If students walk away from this course with a better understanding of how to define a problem and solve it with an idea they have, that would be awesome.
A lot of educational philosophy here, I know. But now we created a strong foundation for teaching Entrepreneurship to school students. Next up, we will be sharing the lesson plan of the first class in the boot camp followed by our experiences of conducting the class.
What do you feel about the educational method we are using? Do you have any suggestions for us which will make the learning experience even better? I would love to know. Please comment below.
