Coneeect Think Act Tank

Experiences from Coneeect Think+Act Tank

Sometimes you need to be pushed to talk about the exciting things happening in your life. (Thanks to Chris from Strascheg Center for pushing) I’ve been to Bavaria last week to attend at the Coneeect Think+Act TankWe did nothing less, but laying the foundation of a new network institution for European Entrepreneurship Educators. For this purpose we gathered together at the Strascheg Center in Munich (which is a nice place to be, if you happen to be an entrepreneur). We’ve been around 40 people from all over Europe and I’ve talked to some of the most extraordinary entrepreneurial minds I’ve met in this field so far.

Besides having the best Bavarian Sushi so far and being part of my first rap opera we’ve worked intensively to design new courses, a novel open entrepreneurship education institution and teach-the-teacher courses. I’ve had talks in several projects, even though I would like to focus on two things, most relevant for my work in the months to come:
(1) byCoKit – a teach-the-teacher platform to design and share courses and course content
(2) Adventures of … Entrepreneurship

byCoKit

byCoKit
Visit us on www.byCoKit.com

During my research on educational technologies and my project work in Entrepreneurship Education in the last three years, I found, that educators who design courses are completely left alone. Preparing for teaching is basically still what it was 20 to 50 years ago. Teachers google for their content of a new course or dive deeply into teaching books. Everything is summed up in excel sheets or written lists and tied to a golden thread. Hopefully in the end every relevant topic to be teached fits into the course schedule.

I ask myself, why is sharing a course outline so complicated? Why don’t we share our course content with other educators, who have nearly the same problems and teach nearly the same topics?

At Freie Universität we’ve created a first prototype of a platform that could solve some of these issues. But we targeted only one institution and had a fairly limited project aim in comparison to thoroughly revise our educational sector. Hence, some friends of mine and I will begin to work on a new platform, called byCoKit. You’ll find more information about it on www.byCoKit.com. I discussed byCoKit with the participants of Think Act Tank and I am looking forward to finding new test users of our upcoming alpha version.

Adventures of … Entrepreneurship

One of our aims as the Coneeect network was designing new courses. Initiated by group discussions and especially driven by the creative mind of @IanHeywood we created „Adventures of … Entrepreneurship“ (… to be filled by „tech“, „health“ or any other topic that fits to an entrepreneurial mind). We designed and scribbled a course outline that contains multiple modules, that partner from different institutions may fill and which adapt to four types of learners the English knew quite well…Adventures of Entrepreneurship EducationI wish I had more information about these types, as they related them to different ‚colors‘ (blue: the analytical type; red: someone who needs structure and order; yellow: creative people; green: social learners)

For each one of these types we created a different module:

  1. Blue: The academic module for entrepreneurs, who want to learn how to validly „Reflect & Analyze“ market opportunities and possibilities for a vivid solution.
  2. Green: „Listen to stories“ is all about story telling and experiencing stories of other people.
  3. Red: „Process Model“ enables students to use a toolset in order to fulfill specific entrepreneurial tasks.
  4. Yellow: „Jump into discovery and experiences“ is all about failing and learning fast through trial and error for creative thinkers.

The whole course is mainly just an outline with a few descriptions, yet. But I am overwhelmed about the effectiveness of our team througout these days in Munich. I am looking forward to seeing you again, hopefully soon.