The Amazing Value of Learning about Digital Tech for Entrepreneurs
(Heads up: there’s a free download link at the end)
If you’re in any way interested in entrepreneurship and innovation, trends in digital technology, or even just digital literacy in general, then you’re going to enjoy reading the story of what happened when I offered a first-of-its-kind course on the digital technologies of entrepreneurship at the business school where I work (Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary).
In a matter of just thirteen weeks, my students (many of whom had no background in tech or business) were creating Twitter bots, inventory management systems, and other small business automation solutions, as well as providing technology consulting to real-world small business owners! The fact that this happened amazes me so much that I want to share the story with you. It made me think that maybe something about how this all happened could be useful to efforts around the world to train people for the digital economy, re-skill people who have lost their jobs, train refugees and immigrants for digital sector jobs in their new countries, or just improve general digital literacy.
How it all started
I got the idea for the course after a list of digital tools I made for students in my regular entrepreneurship course went viral on the internet for a few days (thanks to the ProductHunt community and Slack channels such as Peter Shankman’s ShankMinds group!), and became a reference used by a number of entrepreneurs and educators around the world (400+ people follow that list for updates, and there are also indications in tweets about the list and web traffic origin links). All this, despite many similar lists having come before.
The popularity of the Entrepreneur Tools list made me realize how hungry the world is to learn about the latest digital tools that let entrepreneurs do cool new things, or do important old things cheaper and easier. I put together a draft paper around this concept and labeled it “Entrepreneurship Technology” (you can see me presenting it at a conference here). This is a different way of putting the two words “entrepreneurship” and “technology” together than what people are used to. One big difference is that entrepreneurship technology is useful, like, really useful, to low-tech entrepreneurs as well as high-tech ones, whereas technology entrepreneurship typically excludes low-tech entrepreneurs by definition.
A few months later, I talked to my area chair at Haskayne and got the green light to design and offer a new course around the notion as early as the Winter 2018 term (January to April 2018).
A major challenge
From the outset, we hit a major roadblock: students didn’t know about the course, and had a hard time finding it in the course registration system. So early enrollment numbers were low, and the course was on the brink of cancellation. To save the course, my TA and I advertised it through 2 minute pitches in other classes, and emails to my previous students in other courses. But most importantly, we waived all pre-reqs for the course, which by default required students to have taken a couple of business and entrepreneurship courses before taking this one. Taking these steps resulted in enrollment numbers going up to 32 which was actually pretty good for a first run.
But by waiving all pre-reqs, I had created a huge challenge for myself: I was going to be teaching a diverse group of students from all sorts of majors, many of whom had absolutely no previous background in business or entrepreneurship. The level of comfort and experience with digital technologies also varied quite a bit among the students. While this seemed like a major challenge at first, by the end of the term I was actually glad that this happened, because it proved to me that you actually don’t need much of a background to quickly train yourself in many of the digital technologies available today.
The learner-centered approach
From experience, I know that the best and fastest way to get trained with a new tool of any kind is to play around with it. So I knew this couldn’t be a traditional style course that revolves around the prof lecturing most of the time. I knew that the traditional method didn’t work very well having read Learner-Centered Teaching (one of my favorite books on higher education, summary here) many years earlier, but I often made the common rookie mistake of thinking that if I didn’t lecture enough, students would think I’m slacking off.
This time however, I went all in with the learner-centered style, and really designed a hands-on course involving a lot of active participation by the students, a major consulting projects with a real world client, and a lot of lab work where students spent time in class actually working with digital tools and creating things with them. Over the entire term I spent maybe less than two hours lecturing.
The structure of the course
The first six sessions of the course really focused on understanding what the landscape of digital tools that support entrepreneurship looks like (actually, I might as well call it a “cloudscape” since most of them are cloud-based SaaS tools). What are the major categories and what are the major tools within those categories? What stacks of tools are actual startups using and how are they using them? We were fortunate to get Adrian Camara, the CEO and co-founder of a high-growth Calgary-based tech startup (Athennian, formerly Paper Interactive) to come and speak to our class about their software stack. Adrian gave us specific examples of how certain digital tools are saving his company thousands of dollars, and in some cases (like Zapier) millions of dollars and allowing them to operate in much more lean fashion than what was possible just a few years ago.
A major focus of the second half of the course was a consulting project where student teams had to go out and find a real-world client. The teams found startups or small business owner who needed advice or research support in identifying, comparing, and selecting technology solutions that could make their life easier. Most of these clients were bootstrapping, low budget, not very high tech or high growth small business owners who typically could not afford expensive professional consultants, and did not have the time to research technology solutions themselves. Many of them were not techies and often did not even know what to search for, if they were to search for technology solutions.
Student teams had to present on their consulting projects twice: once to present what problems or needs they have identified with their client, and once to present what solutions they recommended or implemented for the client. Kris Hans (krishans), a specialist in both entrepreneurship and consulting, was kind enough to come to our class and did an awesome job providing suggestions to student teams on how to go about their consulting projects.
As just one example of the value-added created in these consulting projects, many of my student teams found that local small business owners were not aware of inexpensive and efficient hosted website building solutions like weebly.com, wix.com, etc. and were instead overpaying traditional web design service providers for a website that typically had lower quality, lower customizability, lower security, and lower update-ability than what they could build themselves with hosted website building solutions.
Lastly, after a few lab sessions where the students actually used many of the tools themselves in hands-on exercises, they were ready to start putting together combinations of these tools and start building things. Some of their creations that I was amazed by were a Twitter bot for finding job opportunities, a couple of inventory management support tools (this and this), a personal automation system for audio subscribers, and a lead and project management system for startups. (Side note: yes I had them deliver some of their assignments as publicly available blog posts in a class blog right here on Medium.com).
The incredible possibilities of digital experiments in the new cloudscape
It’s amazing how easy it has become to create software and digital automation solutions with the new tools that are available. Once you learn to play around with the tools, the idea of creating something by combining them occurs to you as natural. This is because you are now equipped with all the major elements of a software architecture at the tip of your fingers, each one ready to set up and go live in a matter of minutes. Allow me to elaborate.
If you think of the key components of a three-tier software architecture, you typically have an interface or presentation layer, an application logic layer, and a data layer. Form builders like Google Forms, Typeform, Wufoo, JotForm, etc. can easily fill in for an interface component in many cases. Workflow automation tools like Zapier and IFTTT can pretty much do the work of an application logic layer. Lastly, online spreadsheet and cloud-based database tools like Google Sheets and AirTable can pretty much handle the data layer for many applications.
There are of course, many possible variations to this, as for example the presentation layer could involve presenting output through a data visualization tool, a tweet or an email. The application logic could involve making calculations in a Google Sheet or a Typeform, or taking advantage of workflow and automation features available in other tools. The data layer could in some cases be ignored altogether, just relying on the data already out there (e.g. tweets on Twitter) without necessarily recording them anywhere else. Tools like AirTable and Google Sheets have various input, output, and calculation capabilities that you can sometimes prototype all three layers of the architecture within them, as for example described in this example of Minimum Viable AirTables.
But the general idea is that given the tools available today, it is actually quite easy to put together mock-ups of software ideas, or even some seriously functional technological solutions, without having any previous computer programming knowledge, and just through a few clicks and integrations. Sometimes putting together a series of tools like this results in a semi-functional software that looks a bit like a Frankenstein version of what would have happened if the software was professionally designed and built by a software development team (one of my students used the word “Frankensteined” to describe this). But software development teams are expensive, and these Frankensteins are pretty much free in comparison. So it is of enormous value to be able to conduct experiments at such cheap prices in terms of both money and time.
Most people just don’t know about the tools that makes these experiments so easy, and as more and more people do learn to play around with these tools and combine them, the world will probably see an explosion of new and creative software experiments everywhere.
What did the students say?
Judging by student ratings and their anonymous comments in our University’s instructor evaluation system, most students were pretty satisfied with this course. I was overjoyed that a couple of students specifically used the word “fun” to describe the course, because I always worry about this: as a non-native English speaker, I often have trouble being funny in English and entertaining my students.
The aspects of the course mentioned most positively in their comments are the hands-on, and interactive nature of the course, the real world application and consulting opportunity (which I encouraged them all to add to their resumes / LinkedIn profiles), and just the fact that most of what they learned was so useful and practical for purposes outside the classroom. Here are some of the students comments verbatim from the evaluation forms:
“I liked that instead of learning, you just do things.”
“Very interactive, really cool projects, and fun learning about new technologies.”
“I liked the fact that the class is taught in a practical way, we learn by practicing with real tools.”
“I am very satisfied. It was very different from the other business classes I have taken so far. New approach, nice to learn about technology, since it is very important in this day and age.”
“The labs were a good way to introduce various tools.”
“Learned useful information that I will actually take out of class and use in real life.”
There were also some things the students did not like about the course, and I am working on redesigning the course this year to address some of those concerns. For example, many students thought the course was back-end heavy, and prefer more distributed assignments. Some wanted more structure, more guest speakers, and less group work. There were a couple of mentions of “information overload” and the labs being difficult for people with no tech background.
Why was my course relatively successful?
I have my own theories of why the course was relatively successful in training students with digital skills, but you as someone looking at this from the outside, may have insights that I haven’t thought about, so please let me know if you have any thoughts. For now, my thoughts on some of the factors that led to effective learning in the course are a number of things:
First, the speed to useful proficiency was a big deal. It typically takes years to become an expert at something, and sometimes longer than that to be able to provide professional consulting to others. So it takes a lot of patience. After each individual class on the topic you may still feel far from being professionally useful, which can be very de-spriting and result in loss of motivation. In this course however, students were able to see that with relatively little amount of time and effort, they were able to gain knowledge about a series of tools that could save others who are unaware of them thousands of dollars if not more. Going from scratch to actually providing semi-professional consulting to industry in less than three months was very motivating I believe.
Second, I hate grades and don’t like to think about them much. What’s more important is the value added to society. So I like to raise the stakes in my classes beyond grades and into the real world. High stakes projects with real world clients, and having to post assignments online to be viewable by the entire world, are much better motivators than having to satisfy one prof for a grade.
Third, the learning was immersive and interactive. A lot of it was in the style of “just jump into the pool and learn to swim” rather than “let’s read 10 books about swimming before we touch the water” or “listen to me talk for hours about swimming, and you can go into the water outside of class if you like.” The fact that there were no good textbooks out there for a new course like this, forced us to do less reading and more doing. This is I think the most effective way to train someone in technology. Besides, many of the technological tools we covered are designed my modern-day startups who have to make their products user-friendly and intuitive through careful user experience design, just to compete (and also because it’s 2018).
Fourth, working in teams really helps when you have a diversity of backgrounds and skills in class. Students learned a lot from each other. Even in non-teamwork settings, the diversity of the class really improved the quality of discussions. Students without much relevant background soon realized that they were not alone and so were not afraid to ask questions. Students with a good amount of relevant background soon realized that they are appreciated in this class as experts and mentors to other students.
If you want to take this course
If you or someone you know is a UofC student who may want to take this course in Winter 2019, there’s good news: the pre-reqs are waived again! All you have to do is drop by the undergraduate office in the third floor of the Haskayne building and ask to be registered in ENTI 559.7 (you can’t do this online). Please do this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, so we don’t run into enrollment numbers trouble again!
Farewell, and a free download
Thank you for reading my story!
You can get a free copy of the course outline I used for the Winter 2018 term here.
I would really love to hear any ideas, comments or feedback you may have on it, or on this post. Do you know of a similar course being taught somewhere else in the world? What would you do differently if you had the opportunity to teach such a course? Do you think I pushed the students with no business or tech background too far too soon? What else do you think I should be doing after this? Just shoot me an email.
