Large class “Intro to Entrepreneurship” courses often have a common set of problems:
- Lack of Consistency (between different instructors)
- Low Engagement
- Time-Consuming Assessment
- Expensive Textbooks
Improving Large Classes
ExEC Big Intro is our new toolset to help tackle these challenges!
Consistency and Flexibility
When more than one instructor is teaching an intro course, different teaching approaches can lead to different class outcomes:
Students need a consistent experience regardless of their instructor.
Of course, each instructor also needs flexibility to leverage their areas of expertise.
ExEC Big Intro balances these needs by providing a well-documented, structured set of exercises, that each instructor can customize.
This approach provides a common course foundation (and an easy way to onboard new adjuncts) while enabling each instructor to play to their own strengths.
Passion + Experiences = Engagement
ExEC Big Intro’s first exercise helps students, especially those that don’t identify as entrepreneurs, discover their passions:
Students engage when they work on something they’re passionate about.
Screenshot from ExEC Big Intro’s exercise, “Pilot Your Purpose.”
Once students know their passions, every subsequent exercise leverages them to make lessons relevant. For example, “entrepreneurial finance”, a topic that often shuts students down becomes an experience to answer the question:
“How do you finance your passion?“
Now, regardless of their major, students can see the relevance of entrepreneurial skills – even if they don’t identify as entrepreneurs (yet ;).
Faster Assessment
Assessment is always challenging but for large classes, it can be overwhelming.
One solution is more multiple-choice tests because they’re so easy to grade. Unfortunately, multiple-choice tests assess “reading and regurgitation” skills more than they do entrepreneurial skills.
On the other hand, reflective writing assignments can assess entrepreneurial skills, but aren’t feasible with hundreds of assignments to grade each term.
What we need is the best of both worlds: reflections that are easy to grade. With that goal in mind…
ExEC Big Intro has a new type of assignment: Reflective Quizzes.
Reflective Quizzes have three components:
- An interactive experience
- An open-ended reflection question
- Automated support tools that challenge students to reflect deeply, and make it easy for instructors to assign full, partial and no credit
Here’s a demo of the Reflective Quizzes:
In addition to the student-side checks demonstrated above, the system can also give instructors assessment suggestions (e.g. full, partial, no credit) based on the content of the answer to make grading extremely fast.
With ExEC Big Intro…
Reflective assignments can replace multiple-choice quizzes, even in large classes.
Lowering Costs for Students
We all know how important it is to reduce textbook costs for students.
With the goal of providing experiential learning at a price that’s lower than traditional textbooks, ExEC Big Intro has a new pricing model that aims to make:
Experiential entrepreneurship accessible to all students.
ExEC Big Intro Preview and Pricing
100+ Intro Students?
Request preview and pricing information for ExEC Big Intro here.
Fewer Than 100+ Students?
If you’re not teaching a large class, but are looking for an engaging experience for your students check out the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum.
Used at over 120 colleges & universities, this suite of award-winning experiential exercises will help you structure an engaging skill-based class.
What’s Next?
In an upcoming post, we will share information about our upcoming Summer Summit where we will share some exciting new exercises!
Subscribe here to be the first to grab a “seat” at the Summit.
