Using Medium in an Entrepreneurship Class, pt. 3
When I sat down to localize Lean Launchpad for Kazakhstan, I had to think about what goals this class was to accomplish — especially in the context of the local market.
One of these goals is to get students to help each other. Like many emerging markets, a common belief of what makes a “strong” business person is someone who can always “win” at the cost of someone else; a zero-sum mentality that I think is more common with the older generation. One of the things I loved most about living in the Bay area was just how helpful everyone was, in particular to young entrepreneurs. I suspect this is because no one wants to ignore the next Mark Zuckerburg, but this “helping culture” gives Silicon Valley an incredible edge in staying the world’s startup hub.
To that end, I’ve told my classes that extra credit is done through Medium comments. If they should, through their individual accounts, leave a significantly helpful comment on another team’s post (a mutual introduction, a new customer, etc.), they get a point of extra credit. The students seem enthusiastic about the idea, but I’m not sure Medium is the right, well, medium for cross student communication for a class-based publication (Silicon Steppes).
This is because of the editing process, for two reasons: 1) adding student teams has been really difficult as writers, and the magazine has “lost” writers after saving. Whether this is due to an unreliable school connection or Medium itself, however, I don’t know. And 2), theres no function for student writers to automatically post to the publication — I have to manually approve each submission. This causes problems, as it “chunks” the conversation, and the delay prevents more students from commenting on each other’s post.
For now I’ll keep extra credit for Medium comments (students, take note), but I’ll also add a class VK group, which the majority of my students are already familiar with. Hopefully, this will encourage more cooperation between student teams, in particular across universities.
