Highlights from Fall 2012

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Farnaz

Venture Lab’s fall 2012 courses officially ended on December 25, 2012 just in time for the holidays. During holidays and the first weeks of January, Venture Lab team was working hard on designing course highlights to acknowledge students’ hard work and to share their amazing stories with the world.

The second free online offering of Technology Entrepreneurship attracted tens of thousand of entrepreneurs from all over the world. Entrepreneurs formed teams and worked on their business ideas. Professor Chuck Eesley from Stanford University taught them the fundamentals of technology entrepreneurship as pioneered in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs learnt about the process of finding a high-potential commercial opportunity, gathering resources such as talent and capital, figuring out how to sell and market the idea, and managing rapid growth. Many are still working with their teams on their startups. We have gathered a few of their stories to share it with you. Check them out at: venture-lab.org/venture/highlight . If your projects is up there on the highlights, kudos to you and your team. If it’s not, don’t worry! we believe that you are awesome and you have done an amazing work, share your story with us and we will share it with the world!

Tina Seelig’s Crash Course on Creativity attracted a very diverse student body from over 150 countries around the world. Please check out the course highlights at venture-lab.org/creativity/highlight to see the rainbow of student body with their picture and lessons they have learnt from the creativity class. Tina’s amazing lectures covered framing problems, challenging assumptions, brainstorming and creative teams. The Venture Lab team learnt a lot from Tina’s principles of creativity and practices them every day when designing a new learning experience for you. Crash course on creativity attracted the most amazing students and helped them unleash their potentials. Students worked on creative solutions in their weekly challenges. For example, their second team challenge was to reframe a loaf of bread. Team Just Bread with members from Argentina, Uzbekistan, and United States created this powerful video only using one loaf of bread:

There are many of similar projects. Venture Lab team congratulates all creative students for the amazing work they did!

Last but not least, Designing  a New Learning Environment (DNLE) brought educators from all over the world together. DNLE has created an amazing community of people who care about education and are yet discussing and envisioning learning environments of the 21st century two months after the end of the class. We have showcased some of the DNLE projects and stories at venture-lab.org/education/highlight . We have a few more stories from DNLE teams on the blog. If you are a member of these teams, we congratulate you on your achievement. We believe that all of you did a great job and worked very hard. We are all ears to hear your stories.

We look forward for many more amazing classes here at Venture Lab!

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DNLE Team Addresses Unemployment Through Entrepreneurship Education

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Azim

A team of six education professionals and enthusiasts came together to form the DNLE team Pioneering Lifelong Entrepreneurial Learning. The team, whose members come from three different continents: Europe, Asia and the Americas, has been working to formulate a concept paper proposing a solution to high levels of unemployment experienced by youth in the state of Massachusetts.

“The project work has allowed for an excellent sharing of experience and knowledge across continents and cultures. Some team members have already expressed that they would like to continue working on this project beyond the Venture Lab course,” writes team leader and education reform specialist, Anthony Gribben. An embedded version of the team’s paper can be found below:

The team’s project focuses primarily on improving vocational education in Massachusetts, where the unemployment rate for youth under the age of 25 is as high as 20%. The objective of the team’s project is to raise awareness and understanding, and ultimately to contribute to the dialogue and debate amongst education policy-makers in Massachusetts about the benefits of an improved vocational education program. The team proposes that this can be accomplished through the incorporation of entrepreneurship education within the current curriculum. Keeping in line with Professor Kim’s emphasis on the importance of sustainability, the project seeks to improve existing vocational education framework that was adopted by the state in 2007, rather than proposing an entirely new one.

The team found some of the features of Venture Lab to be instrumental in providing a platform for collaboration. “I found the internal messaging service very useful at the outset particularly in the research, identification and first exchanges with potential team members,” writes Gribben. As the team leader for this project, he identified teammates by browsing student profiles and contacting individuals whose interests and approach to education matched those of the team.

Team members also shared their thoughts about the peer review process, which took place at the end of assignments throughout the course. Team member Teri Bellany, a financial management professional from Bainbridge Island, Washington, wrote: “Submitting peer reviews added to the MOOC experience. It was valuable to get a sampling of the different types of projects people were working on and to be able to provide feedback. It deepened my understanding of scenarios to consider within the context of our own project.” She added that receiving peer reviews helped her to evaluate the application and reach her team’s project. Venture Lab’s peer review process is designed to stimulate team self-reflection and challenge the members to consider their project in ways that are at first unfamiliar. In doing so the team gains a better understanding of how their work can have the most impact.

“In coming together as a virtual team we were all convinced that entrepreneurship education represented an opportunity for communities world wide, no matter their level of development, to promote socio-economic development, stability and prosperity,” writes Gribben. The Venture Lab team commends Pioneering Lifelong Entrepreneurial Learning for their hard work on this concept paper and wishes the team much success in their work on this project after the course has ended.

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International DNLE Team Designs an Education Platform to Empower Girls in Kenyan Slums

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Azim

The members of the team Gempowered collaborated across five different time zones to design Julisha Mobile, a blended learning environment that integrates face-to-face mentorship into a mobile platform designed to empower girls living in disadvantaged communities in Nairobi, Kenya. The presentation they have submitted about their project can be found below:

“We call ourselves Gempowered, an obvious play on words to show that these women are beautiful and precious gems, that are empowered to do great things,” writes Heather Ripmeester, Team Lead. Heather hails from Ottawa, Canada and has written her Master’s degree research paper on factors affecting learning environments in Nigeria. When she enrolled in Professor Kim’s Designing a New Learning Environment course this fall, Heather was delighted to see that there were thousands of people who share similar interests.

Ripmeester initially linked ties with Alison Mead, a DNLE-er from Vancouver, who is actively involved with INVEST Africa, an organization that links 12 technical and vocational education and training institutions in 6 African countries in a capacity building project that uses educational media and technology in flexible and blended programmes. When Alison heard about Professor Kim’s DNLE course, she immediately extended the invitation to her online partners and four of her Kenyan colleagues, Flora Okuku, Nancy Chege, Anne Kithinji, and Freda Kibata, enrolled in the course and joined Gempowered. “Flora is the brains – it was her educational scenario that we developed into Julisha Mobile,” writes Ripmeester, explaining that it was Flora’s commitment to improving the lives of the girls she knew in the slums of Nairobi that drove this project forward. The team also includes Modupe Macaulay, the team’s visual artist, from Lagos, Nigeria, and Jacqui Stecher, the team’s technical wizard, from Capetown, South Africa, who was responsible for getting the team’s presentation up and running.

I have had the opportunity to correspond with each member of Gempowered to get an in-depth understanding of how the Venture Lab platform helped them to collaborate across different time-zones to enable them to formulate ideas and carefully design Julisha Mobile. Most members agreed that the forums were extremely helpful in getting their questions answered and enabling them to share ideas with their classmates. Nancy Chege, for whom Professor Kim’s course was the first exposure a massive open online course, describes her experience using Venture Lab’s forums:

“For me to contribute and participate in such a forum was unthinkable. Who would have thought a girl would grow from my kind of background and be able to hold a discussion with people who have grown with technology all their lives? Who would have thought that it would be possible to sit in the same class with the likes of people I see in this class? Wait……. get this picture. A girl walking through a thicket early in the morning walking like 10km every morning to attend school. Bare footed. See the same girl going through the whole day with no lunch because home was very far. See that same girl sitting in the comfort of her living room attending an MOOC class with people who have grown and developed with technology! See the same girl contributing in the forums and people find some of what she writes worth reading and reply back! Suddenly she feels like she has a forum. May be, just may be one day this same girl will travel outside Kenya and meet some of these people. and perhaps pursue her PhD in those areas which she has only read in books or watched on video!”

In addition to providing a space for dialog and open interaction with other students in he class, Nancy’s teammates echo the sentiment that the Venture Lab forums are full of helpful information that helped them throughout the the course.

A Venture Lab feature that team Gempowered used to collaborate with one another was team journals. This is a feature that allows team members to have one unified online space where members can initiate conversations about time management, divide and allocate responsibilities, and post individual work so that all members can be aware of the progress of their team. “Journals and Forums were very helpful in getting to grips with the people and the content,” writes Alison Mead. Alison also adds that due to the fact that journals were open to the public, the team was approached by other education enthusiasts who were interested in joining team Gempowered. Additionally, team member Modupe Macaulay, pointed out that she liked being able to look at other students’ journals and assignments, to learn from them even if they didn’t post anything on the forums. This was an added benefit of using journals open to the public.

The team also discussed logistical features of the platform that they found useful. All of the team members from Africa remarked that they found the availability of video transcripts to be a very helpful feature. Anne Kithinji mentions that she would often save the transcript and read it offline when she her limited access to the internet did not allow for video-streaming. The team also found that the peer-review process was more than a helpful motivator for students to participate in the course, as it provided a great way for students to be exposed to the ideas and perspectives of their peers.

While Venture Lab does provide a means for people in different continents to collaborate with one another, the projects submitted by team Gempowered and other exceptional DNLE teams are a simple result of hard work and dedication. “One of the many things that makes me proud of Gempowered as a team is that it was a true team effort. Every single person on our team contributed heart, soul and body to make Julisha Mobile a success,” writes Heather Ripmeester. The Venture Lab team congratulates Team Gempowered on their work in Designing a New Learning Environment.

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