Experiential courses produce great results, but it can be challenging to cover everything you want in 8, 10 or 12-week:
- Summer classes
- MBA/graduate programs
- Quarter schedules
- Canadian semesters
Same skills. Less time.
A compressed schedule doesn’t mean your students can’t develop many of the same skills as longer courses, but it does mean you need to be strategic with your course design. That’s because:
Customer interviews and business model experimentation skills take time to develop.
It’s tempting to compress these into a few days, but to really learn them takes practice. That means students may have the best experience by reducing the topics we cover and devoting more time to the highest ROI skills.
So while we’re always disappointed to see topics like pricing optimization go in shorter courses, there are a set of topics we always cover because they offer the best bang for the buck in terms of entrepreneurial mindset development:
- Idea Generation: Great business ideas come from understanding customer’s needs
- Business Modeling: How to identify your
- Customer Discovery Interviews: The core of building a successful business is understanding a customer’s emotional needs
- Design Thinking: The best way to understand your customer is to see the world from their perspective
- Financial Modeling: Great business models must be financially viable and sustainable
- MVPs: Minimum Viable Products focus on learning about business models.
- Experimentation: How to identify and test the riskiest assumptions of a business model
- Pitching & Storytelling: How to create an emotionally driven narrative
Example 8-Week Syllabus
Below you’ll find an 8-week sample syllabus you can use if you teach:
- Summer
- Graduate and
- MBA classes
Example 10-Week Syllabus
If you teach on the quarter system, feel free to use this 10-week sample syllabus:
Example 12-week Syllabus
Our 12-week syllabus is perfect for our friends in Canada!
Get the Sample Syllabi
Split it Across Two Classes
Another option is to divide the topics across two courses. A number of the schools we work with take our 15-week schedule and do just that.
With ExEC, students get access for life, so splitting the material across two classes can save them money.
Typically that looks like:
- An intro course that focuses on “Why (and How) to Find Problems Worth Solving”
- A new venture creation course on “How to Find Solutions Worth Building”
The benefit of this approach is that students get plenty of time to develop both sets of skills.
Teaching in Summer?
Check out ExEC, a structured, experiential curriculum that’s flexible enough to work online, in-person, or both with any length of class.
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, we will share tips and tricks to create engaging communication using Discord!
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