To Örebro University

Entrepreneurship has traditionally been taught about entrepreneurship. However, teaching entrepreneurship requires practice and learning by doing. In entrepreneurship education students practice entrepreneurship by feeling the real life of being an entrepreneur. The process of Design Thinking offers a method for teaching through entrepreneurship (Kremel & Wetter-Edman, 2019).

Teaching Design Thinking requires interaction and in our entrepreneurship class we have used classroom workshops to attain interaction. With the pandemic we were faced with the challenge to interact using online teaching. 

A quick adaptation with the transition to distance education was an equality argument for me where I wanted to give all students the same opportunity to participate in education, regardless of whether you were in a risk group or not. It should not be decisive for the students to be able to assimilate the teaching, I thought. I absorbed learning in various online forums and lectures from Harvard education to be able to handle the new classroom that zoom then became. Something I learned in these forums was the importance of planning a lesson with more short steps to increase student engagement. Participating in zoom is particularly tiring and therefore working with shorter intervals of different nature, such as reviews, work in break-out rooms and reunions, I have understood contributes to commitment and thus students' learning (Roberto, 2021).

It was a challenge to plan for the interactions and workshops that we were expected to deliver to the students in the entrepreneurship course. I took plenty of time to plan all the steps in the smallest detail. Part of the work consisted of preparing the teaching and using the so-called flipped classroom, where I recorded a series of short lectures that the students watched before the lessons. It is important to keep the films short with a specific focus to create engagement (Roberto, 2021). We could then use the time efficiently when we were seen in zoom and the students had great opportunities to be well prepared. The zoom format also facilitated collaboration in teaching such as guest lectures. I was therefore able to invite guest lecturers who deepened the material for the students. During the course, we also found a new program that worked well for interacting online, Miro. Miro is specially created to make it easier for creative teams who want to interact on a common White board and where members can work remotely to each other. The result of our efforts was good. The students were committed and showed interest in their projects and education. It was especially fun to see pretty much all the students on the course participated regularly in our workshops and that we received good reviews in the course evaluation. 

The experiences from moving the interaction from the classroom to online teaching are multiple and we don’t want to go back. Online teaching opens new ways of teaching and engaging students and we like develop and refine our pedagogical tools for interaction online.   

References: 

Kremel, A., Wetter-Edman, K. (2019). Implementing design thinking as didactic method in entrepreneurship education, the importance of through. The Design Journal, 22 (Suppl. 1), 163-175. doi:10.1080/14606925.2019.1595855.

Roberto, M. (2021), Getting - and Then Keeping - Students Engaged, Webinar recording, Harvard Business Publishing Education.