Presenters
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Wayne Chang, Lecturer at Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business
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Connor Al-Joundi, Andrew Situ - BET 300 students
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Stefanie Bruinsma, Neil Mackay - BET 608 students
Wayne Chang and his former students describe how their courses develop entrepreneurial mindset through experiential learning experiences. The classroom environment is in workshop mode where students communicate and collaborate in small groups and give brief presentations on specific concepts which are contextualized for business and startups' processes. They next apply their learning outside the classroom in the form of actual startup pitch competitions, as well as assessing and iterating business models for actual community partners or early stage startups in the Waterloo Region startup ecosystem.
These courses are designed with elements of Cognitive Load Theory, the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship and the CAST Universal Design for Learning.
Further Resources:
Experiential Learning and Entreprenuerial Mindset Through External Classroom Opportunities slides here.
Some Take-Aways Shared by Participants:
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Experiential approaches really do impact student engagement
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Active & engaged learning yields better retention & recall
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Concept maps are a great way to put abstract concepts into frameworks
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Focusing on active and experiential approaches might take a bit more (different?) effort, but it enhances student learning
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The main takeaway was in explicitly talking about learning as part of a course. It is so tempting to jump immediately into teaching content, but I can see the value in taking a half lecture and talking about the course design and how it reflects student learning of that course's subject matter.
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If you engage students in active learning, they’re more likely to remember the lesson
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Learning doesn’t/shouldn’t all happen inside the classroom – real world experience is invaluable
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Create a supportive classroom environment
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Students don’t necessarily need formative assessments to show evidence of learning
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Learning is student driven and demonstrated through end-of-course summary of key concepts; success is not tied to marks but to learning.