Venture College @BoiseStateLive Launches in August

Received a thoughtful email from Greg Hahn at Boise State University the other day telling me about their new Venture College. Sounds very exciting and it seems they have buy in and support from the entrepreneurial community in Boise. Can’t wait to hear about their incoming class. From Venture College’s homepage:

Venture College prepares students to launch businesses or nonprofits. This new, non-credit program is open to all full-time students in any major , especially non-business students. Students who successfully complete the program receive the Boise State University Venture College Badge.

Start-up is Fall 2013. While the application deadline has passed, we are accepting applications for the wait list. If you would like to submit an application and be added to our wait list click here to apply. We expect to notify wait list applicants on May 15 as to whether or not there is room in the program.

Interestingly, when you visit the Why Venture College page you read this…

Boise State is taking a leadership role in developing models to teach the skills necessary to succeed in the 21^st century.  We are challenging traditional educational strategies and piloting new methods for superior, relevant education. One of the new models is Venture College, a skills-based program that will prepare our students, especially non-business students, to launch enterprises of economic and social value, some while they are still students.

Venture College will provide self-paced, on demand access to knowledge, intensive mentoring and an opportunity to compete for resources needed to start a business.

Venture College is a unique university-wide initiative independent of any academic college and structured as a concurrent, non-credit program for degree seeking students.  This independence from traditional course, credit and accreditation requirements frees Venture College to deliver an innovative and rigorous non-traditional experience for those students, regardless of discipline, who have a passion for starting their own businesses or working in new ventures.

Pretty exciting, glad to have learned about Venture College at Boise State and we’ll see what the Broncos come out with and what the playbook looks like in August 2013 when the first class begins.

via Venture College | Green light your dreams.

Iman Jalali: If My School Had an Entrepreneurship Major, I Wouldn’t Have Dropped Out #highered

From Iman Jalali at The Accelerators Blog at WSJ.com:

I dropped out of college because my marketing and business major wasn’t allowing me to create and build. I was listening to lectures that weren’t relevant to me or for what I already knew I wanted to do: Start a business.

I wish they had taught me about idea validation, customer acquisition and bootstrapping. That’s what would make for a great entrepreneurship program, and what would have kept me engaged and happy with the skills I was learning.

Ideally, an entrepreneurship major would not be treated like just another business major. It’s not about book learning; It’s not about lectures. It’s about finding your passion, gathering resources, testing your idea and being able to scale.

Having students create startups during their major while being mentored by founders themselves would be an invaluable experience. Legitimate businesses, with business licenses, credit-card merchant accounts — the whole nine yards. Basically a “Startup Weekend” that lasts the entire time you’re in school. Not to mention the perks of having a job after graduation and possibly creating jobs for peers if your startup is successful.

Offering an entrepreneurship program would not only help students prepare for the challenges that await them, but would also give them the hands-on experience so many current entrepreneurs wished they had at a college-level. I say, don’t deny the business-savvy minds of today’s world and fuel them with the resources they need to succeed.

via Iman Jalali: If My School Had an Entrepreneurship Major, I Wouldn’t Have Dropped Out – The Accelerators – WSJ.

Business Model, Customer Development Celebration | USASBE LAUNCH! |

Received an email the other day about a celebration / competition focusing on business models and customer development. Lots of mentoring and tools will be available for undergraduate participants. Check out the USASBE Launch competition website.

USASBE Launch! is an exciting global student startup competition designed to provoke and reward undergraduate students from any discipline who can

1) design an impactful idea,

2) identify, test and validate business model hypotheses using customer development tools and

3) show traction which measures how well a startup is delivering its business model and how well the target demographic is accepting that business model.

There is no required application process, but students can sign up to receive updates. There are no required fees or purchases, there is no required format or procedures. We will recommend a process and tools, and students can engage as much or as little as they desire. The ultimate goal of student participants should be to start a sustainable business and tell an engaging story . . . plain and simple.

via USASBE LAUNCH! | A New Generation of Possibility.

On the Road to My PhD in Entrepreneurship… Do We Dare Write for Readers?

As I begin to see the light at the end of my dissertation on student entrepreneurs (which to date has no hypothesis being tested!) I found some great hope and inspiration in a long essay by William Germano, Dean of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union. Germano’s article, “Do We Dare Write for Readers” is some important questions about higher education today and publications. I appreciate many of his sentiments and most especially for us to write about things that people care about and to provide work that can be used as a tool. Germano offers a ‘machine’ model of the book. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The book-as-machine requires that the scholarly writer imagine a problem or concern that will engage the reader, making the investment of reading time worthwhile.

This is not the same as having a thesis or an argument. Those are author-centered positions. They’re about what the writer thinks. The book-as-machine turns the spotlight onto a problem to be solved, and the reader for whom the problem is genuine, and genuinely interesting.

Later,

Yet implicit in the machine model is that the writer openly acknowledges that the book enables collective action. Reader, can you apply my theory to your own field? Can you take this book’s idea and go further? Can you take what the writer provides and build what the writer could never have imagined? This is imagining one’s writing as activism­—not necessarily political, but activism in the sense that it causes action in others.

So how can writing be, in a good sense, a mechanical contrivance? To consider writing as a machine for changing readers is to acknowledge that the power to persuade isn’t restricted to the political stump or the pulpit or the agora. Something more needs to be at stake than a new adjustment to a theory or a sequence of facts.

I’m advocating for a riskier, less tidy mode of scholarly production, but not for sloppiness. I’m convinced, though, that the scholarly book that keeps you awake at night thinking through ideas and possibilities unarticulated in the text itself is the book worth reading. It may be that the best form a book can take—even an academic book—is as a never-ending story, a kind of radically unfinished scholarly inquiry for which the reader’s own intelligence can alone provide the unwritten chapters.

via Do We Dare Write for Readers? – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

MBA Students: Why Take an Internship When I Can Start Up?

When I took an internship with a pre-IPO startup in between my 1st and 2nd years of bschool at U of C I was nearly alone on the entrepreneurship career path. Today the route is more established and the infrastructure is filling out. From Inc.

An increasing number of MBA students are foregoing traditional summer internships in favor of a start-up experience, reports Bloomberg Businessweek.

Thirteen percent of this year’s Harvard Business School graduates founded or worked at a start-up last summer—a 4 percent increase since 2011—while 9 percent of both the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Graduate School of Business’s graduating classes did the same.

“[Students] want a different skill set. They’re looking for a skill set that’s appropriate for start-ups and small fast growing companies, which is quite different from the skill set they’d need for a large company,” Prof. Erik Gordon, who teaches entrepreneurship at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and University of Michigan Law School, told Inc.

BTW, the BusinessWeek article by Erin Zlomek has some great information and anecdotes.

Business accelerators have become another popular destination for first-year MBA students looking to start a business over the summer. These programs, which support startups through a combination of grants and mentoring, legal, accounting, and other services, are highly competitive and frequently reject applicants who aren’t committed to dropping out of school if their companies flourish. “I made a spreadsheet of 55 or 60 accelerator programs of all different flavors. Some paid, some didn’t, some took equity,” says former Harvard student Danielle Weinblatt, 29.

Again, its great to see how much the infrastructure for entrepreneurial students is growing. As to be expected, much of this is coming bottom up or from off of campus.

via MBA Students: Why Take an Internship When I Can Start a Company? | Inc.com.

#Hackmason | edx/XBlock · GitHub | MOOC

Startup Mason and The Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship are hosting HackMason 1.0 on April 5th and 6th. We will be offering broad #highered challenges for our attendees (sign up here). One of the challenges will involve developing for edX and its Xblock. Here are some basics at GitHub on XBlock Courseware Components from edX.org (created by Harvard and MIT):

XBlock is a component architecture by edX.org for building courseware.

This is a pre-alpha release of the XBlock API, to gather input from potential users of the API. We like what is here, but are open to suggestions for changes. We will be implementing this shortly in the edX LMS.

This repo contains the core code for implementing XBlocks as well as a simple workbench application for running XBlocks in a small simple environment.

BackgroundEdX courseware is built out of components that are combined hierarchically. These include components like the video player, LON-CAPA problems, as well as compound components like learning sequences. We are developing a second-generation API for these components called XBlocks. Although they’re in a prototype stage, we like the API, and want to collaborate with others to develop them into an industry standard. This is our proposed API and specification for XBlocks.

How does this differ from existing industry standards like LTI and SCORM? On a high level, XBlocks is a Python language-level API, and it provides sensible defaults for things like storing data. XBlocks could be wrapped up in LTI, and one could make an LTI XBlock. The core reason to write an XBlock is that it is deployable. You can give us the code to an XBlock, and we can embed it in our courseware. LTI would require you to give us a virtual machine image which ran it.

We are really excited to work with this new courseware to see what can be developed at our Hack Mason 1.0 event. Please, if you are in the DC Metro, let us know how you would like to be engaged in this event. #edtech #highered #hackedu #mooc

via edx/XBlock · GitHub.

CA Crazy | Bold Move To #MOOC Sends Shock Waves, Details Scarce | The Chronicle of Higher Education

California politicians want to use MOOCs to satiate those on waiting lists for basic classes at public institutions of higher education. Interesting approach, looking forward to watching this unfold. As with all things, California’s size has the ability to alter policy across the country and even the world. From Chronicle of Higher Education:

Senate Bill 520, sponsored by State Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who is president pro tem of the Senate, calls for establishing a statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level, high-demand classes could take approved online courses offered by providers outside the state’s higher-education system. If the bill is passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, state colleges and universities could be compelled to accept credits earned in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, bringing the controversial courses into the mainstream faster than even their proponents had predicted.

But right now SB 520 is just a two-page “spot bill,” a legislative placeholder to be amended with details later. And for those concerned about the consequences of a sudden embrace of a relatively new enterprise such as MOOCs, the devil may be in those details. Who will approve the courses? What role will faculty members really have? Will student financial aid apply to paid online courses? How will the revenue collected by the companies benefit the colleges? The students?

At a news conference announcing the bill, Mr. Steinberg acknowledged that such a bold move could be expected to cause “some fear, and sometimes some upset.” He took pains to emphasize that the legislation “does not represent a shift in funding priority” for higher education in California, and is not intended to introduce “a substitution for campus-based instruction.”"This is about helping students,” he said. “We would be making a big mistake if we did not take advantage of the technological advances in our state” to do so.

via A Bold Move Toward MOOCs Sends Shock Waves, but Details Are Scarce – Government – The Chronicle of Higher Education.