It’s not only about entrepreneuship teaching…

Hi, it’s me, Anne! I’m going to write about an experiment how to teach in an integrative way using playful online discussions.

Jere Brophy has said in his book “How to motivate the students”, published 2014, that the school is not a youth camp or a leisure center – both the learners and the teachers must achieve the goals of the curriculum there. Consequently, teacher motivation strategies must focus on motivating learners to learn to achieve the intended learning outcomes. Not so easy task, isn’t it?

Students always asking: “Do I need these knowledge and skills in my job?” It gave us, teachers of informatics, entrepreneurship and communication, the idea of integrating the knowledge and skills that learners acquire in different subjects into one whole and let the students know how to use them.

What did we do?

Actually nothing. Since yet. Because this experiment is getting to realize next semester because of the need to cooperate with foreign colleagues as well. So here’s the general idea of future collaboration.

We are going to create series of videoconferences (workshops) where entrepreneurship experts and academics share their experience introducing entrepreneurship field. The initial reason for this kind of cooperation is that participants are located in different places in Finland and Estonia. The dialogue is targeted at exploring the subject of the entrepreneurship in ways that might be useful to a range of different learners and academics from different universities and entrepreneurship experts through posing questions, asking for opinions and experience, presenting own perspectives about how to be and act enterprising. Experts will also give to students practical excercises and case studies to solve. Finnish and estonian students will have also a group work to do through the whole course and they will present the results of this group work in the end of the course. Several academics will help students during the course in the field of entrepreneurship, international communication, english language and informatics.

Communicating and cooperation with so many people is not easy it think. At the same time, the benefits of doing so will make you struggle. Some reasons why to try this kind of experiment are as follows: to integrate several subjects, to internationalize curriculum, to bring into the course specific real-life knowledge and experience of experts, to develop students’ skills how to make presentations and communicate online and in the foreign language. I think it could be motivating for students.

However, it can also be scary. It is not everyday task to include everyone in the international dialogue, try to connect different topics and people, engage participants in case studies, to frame all the content and discussions, etc. I think it needs practice and evaluation from all the parties to make sure if it was meaningful for both sides.

How we are going to do it?

Fortunately, we’ve been using Zoom for video conferencing, as well as headphones and a microphone for better listening. As always before using the technology we’ll test the functionality of the technical tools and provide an alternative Internet connection. Here we’ll also use the support of our university’s educational technologist to be ready for the unexpected circumstances.

Since there are many parties, we’ll agree in a meetings scenario: what is the purpose of each meeting, what parts it is composed of, who will lead the meeting, how and when other participants contribute, what are the responsibilities of all parties, and so on.

I think that the preparation of each videoconference can be planned based on the model of the planning of the whole course:

• Steps ahead of: analyzing phase (setting up instructional goals and required resources), designing phase (setting up learning objectives, instructional and testing strategies), developing phase (creating learning resources).
• Steps during the activity: implementing phase (engaging participants and preparing the learning space).
• Steps after the activity: evaluating phase (evaluating the learning resources and their matching with instructional design).

With these steps we would like to avoid tehnical problems, unpreparedness of any parties, students’ late or missing, understanding the aim and process in a different way, not flowing dialogue, etc. We’ll try to engage students playing with perspectives to gain a deeper understanding; respond to what they hear, putting forward their own perspectives and engaging with the thoughts and ideas present before them; and let the dialogs open-ended with no immediate clear and fixed point because of making new ideas, insights, knowledge and perspectives.

How does it come out for us? As in the figure below? We hope not : )

Picture from imgur by snidawgg

As a barriers could be that estonian and finnish students are shy and not so talktative and on the other side it could be difficult to cooperate with colleagues and experts. As a crucial factor we see that we have to involve other academics and experts from the very beginning to the planning phase. We will certainly learn a lot from this experience and it is worth testing because there are some success factors which give us the courage to try. These are practical topics for students and participating experts of the field.

What is our best advice?

Did the previous offer interest for you? In this case feel free and try it according to your personal style. We are all somewhat different and our personality also influences our teaching choices.

After testing, let us know how did it do!

You also want to know how we are doing? Then meet right here!