What I Learned from 500 Educators – Build Back Better Summit – Results

With the theme “Build Back Better” Jerry Engel, Pete Newell, Steve Weinstein and I co-hosted nearly 500 Lean Educators from 63 countries and 235 universities online for a three-hour session to share what we’ve learned about educators on how we can help our communities rebound, adjust, and recover.

We got insights from each other about tools, tips, techniques and best practices.

Here’s what we learned.

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Background
When we last ran this virtual summit in July, our 400 educators were just coming to grips with teaching remotely. The two questions on the table were, 1) Could the lean methodology work remotely? 2) And what kind of pedagogy would support a class that depended on “getting out of the building” to work virtually? Tactically, how effective would customer discovery be for the students? Would customers sit for virtual interviews? How would you show them minimal viable products if not in person? How do you keep students engaged?

This Summit
This summit discussed how the pandemic has shifted the way we teach, but also what we learned teaching and how we can use the Lean methodology to make an impact on our communities.

COVID-19 has dramatically altered the business landscape. Main Street businesses are severely affected. While many parts of the high-tech sector are growing, others are either contracting or shutting down. Amid these uncertain times we believe that Lean educators can prepare students for this new investing climate and help communities recover.

The summit opened with a panel of Investors sharing their insights of what the funding environment for entrepreneurs, non-profits and small businesses will look like as the economy recovers. See here for a video of the investor panel.

Next, Lee Bollinger President of Columbia University in conversation electrified the audience with description of the fourth purpose of a university. (I’ve summarized our conversation with the video and transcript of the entire talk following the summary.)

The core of the summit was gathering the collective wisdom and experience of the 500 attendees as we split into 20 breakout rooms. Besides sharing tips for teaching traditional entrepreneurs the discussion also included how we could help Main Street businesses. The output of the breakout sessions provided a firehose of data, a ton of useful suggestions, teaching tips and tools. Following Lee’s talk I’ve summarized the collective notes from the breakout session.

Lee Bollinger – Columbia
The three purposes of a university are research, education, and public service. But universities should take on an additional role. To try to impact and affect the world in good ways, it’s what I call the fourth purpose of a university. No university has said, “We should design the institution to have a bigger impact using academic work and join up with outside entities and organizations and partners to do that.” And that’s what the fourth purpose is all about.

If one looks around in the world, you see these huge problems, massive inequality, hunger, poverty, climate change, issues of how to set up a global trading system. You have national problems. So, there’s no shortage of major issues.

NGOs play a very important role, but they tend to be very focused on some particular issue. If you look at think tanks, again, many of them are captured by particular interests. And universities have this incredible sort of filled-with-public purpose people who want to have an effect on the world.

One of the things that’s been striking to me over the course of my career is that those people probably will not get credit for that work in the promotion and tenure process. And that strikes me as crazy. We should embrace in the appointment process people who have incredible talents of that kind. People who are extremely gifted and talented at making things happen in the world. I think all of us have known people like that.

[If we do this] we would have a cohort of people within our institution who are of equal standing, with the greatest scholars and the greatest teachers. But they are the greatest at having impact on the world. We do this to some extent. That’s why it’s interesting in a way. It’s not even like it’s completely novel. I mean, the great surgeon, the great lawyer will be an adjunct in the law school, or the great business person will be an adjunct in the business school. But we don’t embrace it in the way that I’m thinking about. So there’s who do you embrace within the university and what do you value?

I think it’s a very pragmatic and practical –  where do you situate in your mind universities in the context of the world? Should they be highly removed and only focused on teaching and scholarship with some public service on the side? Or should they be actively engaged with problems, ready to work with outside people and organizations?

See Columbia World Projects.

If you can’t see the video of Lee Bollinger’s talk click here. The transcript of his talk is here.

Breakout Sessions
The core of the summit was gathering the collective wisdom and experience of the 500 attendees as we split into 20 breakout rooms.(There were also a special breakout room for those interested in the new Hacking for Environment/Oceans course that started at UCSC and UCSD this year.)

The output of the breakout sessions provided a firehose of data, a ton of useful suggestions, teaching tips and tools. I’ve summarized the collective notes from the breakout session. 

The consensus in our July summit and reinforced again in this summit was, yes you can teach via Zoom and “get out of the building” when you physically can’t. And it’s almost good enough. Further, our 3-hour long classes which were challenging in person required a redesign to be taught online. Zoom fatigue was real.

General Observations

• Crisis accelerates certain trends. COVID broke the myth that distant learning was problematic and isn’t as effective.
• It forced everybody into remote learning, and a lot of people came away with the feeling of, hey, for a lot of things, this works much better than we thought it was going to work.
• Now everybody has lived through a pivot. Everybody has experienced disruption and perhaps is now more open to looking at new ideas.
• That’s going to be a carryover into when we can go back. How do you use that as a technique and not be afraid of it?
• We need to remember in these difficult times that many of the skills we’re teaching – problem solving and running around the brick wall or through it – are life skills that we’re teaching. They’re not restricted just to entrepreneurs.
• Not pretending it’s business as usual was a great lesson

Pedagogy – How We Teach Remotely

• On-line has made it easier for teams to meet, mentors to meet, easier access to world-class speakers.
• The importance of actually doing good instructional design, was pointed out as is time consuming and significant work to do up front. But it pays off in enabling much better engagement and retention.
• it’s forced educators to become much more coherent and clearer about what they want to achieve with their teams and their students.
• Understand that that it takes longer for people to absorb information when delivered online.
• The flipped classroom approach – lectures as prerecorded homework – reduces remote class load. It can make your synchronous time more focused on collaboration, both with you and the students as an instructor, but also among the students themselves.
• Make each lecture available in advance of the class.
• Reinforce the lectures with examples during the zoom session
• We’re doing better online than ever. In classes it’s easier to get people to participate but it’s difficult to keep momentum, especially when you get into the hard part of customer discovery
• Overall, there’s a higher pressure to be more entertaining
• Some institutions have asked the students to design the class. They choose a topic, then the students design the class or help design the class
• It’s really difficult to maintain that one-on-one intimacy, but zoom has been a passable kind of safe option.\
• We’ve had faculty say that hybrid classes – teaching both in person and virtually, simultaneously – are probably the most detrimental learning environment
• Hybrid teaching – some students physically in classroom wearing along with others online was pretty detrimental to the quality of instruction
• One way of ensuring that students go through the advanced materials, is to have the students come up with a question about the material in advance
• When it all changes, we’ll go back in person. But zoom is simply a classroom which just happens to be electronic. And the breakout rooms are simply a breakout, a study session, it just happens to be electronic. I think you can build an argument that there are more innovative and more interesting ways to do this. I just don’t know what they are yet.

In-Class Timing

• Shorten the time that you’re going to do things. You can no longer do a full day, you can perhaps do three hours max virtually
• Break things into very, very small chunks, bite sized chunks, one-minute, not 20-minute presentations for teams. And micro videos so people can watch to learn things
• You got to break everything up – 10/15 minutes, it can’t be anything longer than that
• Keep everything very, very short
• Make things very bite sized, even when you’re all together online
• The chunking concepts worked really well for students, and array those chunks of information in a buffet rather than a monolith – to make it easier for students to access
• Make certain you boil your class down and reiterate, “these are the five things you needed to take away from this discussion.” Because at the end of the day, there are a little bit overwhelmed
• Students being overwhelmed was a running narrative

Reach of the Classroom

• Educators can reach a much larger audience, even a worldwide audience. And that really opened up the educators minds that they can teach not just to a single group, but to a much larger group
• Having a worldwide audience is now possible. Which is a huge strength and has network benefits that people couldn’t anticipate
• Teaching remote enabled being able to increase access. There were some great examples of enabling students in Africa to participate in programs from Australia, which had never happened before
• It made me think of us as teachers without borders. That access is really pushed out to everybody now, to a much, much increased attendance
• We can bring more people in from outside the classroom. Not only the theorists but constituents for customer development, or with Main Street businesses and local constituents
• We’re no longer restricted by the size of the classroom. This year we’ve gone from 8 teams and 32 students to 16 teams and 80 students

Guest Speakers

• A year ago students would have looked down on not having in-person guests. Today they’re blown away by who we can get
• Remote teaching offers a broader access to more guest lecturers. It’s a lot easier for guests to say yes in because they don’t have to drive in, they can do it from their offices
• Pre-recording some guests enables access to guests who normally would say no because of their schedule

Customer Discovery

• Getting out of the classroom in some ways can be a lot easier when you’re never actually in a classroom. There aren’t the same travel and logistical challenges.
• Getting zoom interviews is actually easier. So some of the discovery process has been easier online
• Mixed results, we were able to get more people engaged to get more people do more interviews, and because people are more available online. But we couldn’t go as deep and couldn’t do more of the informal observation, that part of really getting to some insight
• We need to know what sweet spots for customer development work best with zoom and that don’t work best with zoom. We need to give our students greater guidance around that point.

Minimal Viable Products

• The very important role the MVP plays today, especially when you’re working in zoom. If you can get the product quickly, cheaply, and without using a lot of funding, you need to do that, because that’s going to get you a lot further along in terms of what you can learn from a customer development perspective.

Breakout Sessions

• Organize to have more class time in the breakout rooms in smaller groups, because this is where engagement really happens
• As soon as you jump into a breakout session as a professor, you’re going to kill the discussion. Be sensitive, don’t jump in, let them finish the discussion on their own
• Breakout sessions held via zoom help maintain team chemistry
• Keeping the same team composition in the breakout sessions make those sessions work really well, compared to when they had split teams

Student Engagement

• The wallflowers within the class get to use chat, versus in person where they’re not going to participate at all.
• How do you create energy during zoom sessions, especially during international calls?
• There’s a drop off in engagement after one hour. Basically, they just disappear from the zoom
• Some of the good things was being able to institute virtual pitching, virtual customer discovery, and in some cases a hosted special session to motivate faculty and students
• Encourage students to learn the skill to consult with each other. This is a crucial skill. To be able to guide each other and say, “Well what did you learn about your customer discovery. And what did you learn about the value proposition.” Have them take the role of the educator a little bit

Collaboration

• We need to find ways to allow students/teams do distance socialization. Find those kinds of activities in a way that gels the team and make that work out
• Socializing happens naturally in person. You go out to dinner after things, you go get pizza, you hang out. That’s much harder to do virtually
• Finding collaboration tools which can be used both during the zoom sessions but also outside of class. So students and the overall class can interact, both during the official hours, as well as during the unofficial hours
• We’re no longer having these bigger networked conversations where you can have the serendipitous meet at the watercooler or the trade show, and kind of increase the creativity. But because of that some of these interactions have become more meaningful and purposeful because they’re very focused
• Providing those tools is really important because they can’t just go have a cup of coffee after class, they can’t all get together at seven o’clock
• Eventually bonding does happen if the teams meet on a regular basis and really connect over time
• Community building is very challenging in remote context. Even though you’re able to get across a lot of the learning objectives, you’re missing a lot of these intangibles
• Using tools like Mural, Discord, Slack and ClassEdu creates a sense of community and ongoing collaboration
• Get the input from the students about what collaboration tools they’re most fluent in 

Team Formation

• Teams have more trouble forming and norming under the current circumstances
• There’s the forming, storming, norming, performing kind of thing about teams that happens through working together over time, and socializing
• Team formations to really gel as a team can happen in this kind of remote environment – but it takes longer

Students/Teams

• Continually push more for diversity in students/founders; older people, Hispanics, women, brown and black – people of all of all flavors
• Having someone who looks like them lead the class info/recruiting sessions for diverse students. This dramatically changes the class makeup
• Be sensitive to students’ personal situations
• Students will turn off their videos, not because they’re checking out, but because of their location (bedroom, basement, sitting in their underwear, etc.)
• Suggest a class rule that participation is part of the grade. When they do talk, they have to put the camera on. That’s a compromise on the sensitivity
• In the online environment, it is a little bit more difficult to gauge feedback from teams
• You need to work hard helping build highly engaged and motivated teams
• You want to push them to take advantage of being virtual and conducting extreme customer discovery
• On the other side, teams who might have started out strong at the beginning of COVID, and found it easier to do things virtually, have now hit a serious virtual fatigue, and are kind of disengaged and not excited about it. And just really exhausted, too exhausted to take anything more on

Mentorship

• Mentorship becomes a lot easier. Rather than having to get people face to face meeting, we are now able to connect people. we are being able to bring the right mentors from around the country or even around the world to help our students with mentoring
• There are three kinds of mentors; process mentors – those that know what’s coming up. Technology mentors, and then market mentors. Zoom makes it easier to have more people involved
• Reach out to older/retired entrepreneurs, find them and put them into the mix as mentors, sometimes as founders and coaches and so forth. They’ve got time they’re willing to help
• Keeping mentors and investors engaged over the video was a bit of a problem. They managed to shorten and simplify the process that tended to help. But q&a engagement is still a little bit of a struggle.

Exams

• Exams need to be testing more of the understanding in the application of the concept
• You can have an exam that is open for six or 24 hours. And then you’re able to actually ask the students to demonstrate more of the understanding of the concepts

Post-Covid Teaching

• How do we make sure that our students who may be falling behind and may not have been able to keep up because of the COVID pandemic?
• How do we make sure that they’re on track after we get back?
• How do we make sure that we are adjusting for their return and the return to normalcy after we get back?

Main Street

• We as educators need to not treat solopreneurs or Main Street businesses as second-class citizens in our classrooms or incubators, or our meetups. They’re embracing the risks and challenges that big tech startups are embracing
• Main Street customers had product market fit, and now they’re experiencing for the first time falling out of product market fit
• Business owners are distracted, focused on day-to-day issues. And they’re impacted personally
• Looking at all aspects of the entrepreneur has been a real focus on prioritizing the human element, when folks are dealing with layoffs, or cash flow issues, or potential eviction
• How do we work with companies/startups that are maybe not so much innovation driven, but necessity driven? Because of the dislocations being created by COVID-19, and economic dislocation
• How do we provide services at scale to help coaching? We had some people who had sent their students to help those local businesses in this time of need and pivoted their classes from doing the next step to helping mainstream businesses do it
• And we had people doing that, both in Africa and in San Jose. And with Hacking for the community in Hawaii and going out to rural areas. But we still struggle with how to engage, especially with rural communities to help them do that
• When you go out to rural areas, that younger people who are already fluent in the tools are more are more likely to engage
• Similarly, the idea that empathy and engagement is extremely scalable. So some of the core principles here have really scaled a lot
• One of the things that was really interesting was connecting entrepreneurial students with waitresses and bartenders to help them figure out how to get additional funding to compensate for the lack of subsidies they might not have been able to receive
• It’s not always a sexy company that the student gets to work with. But they get to see real impact. And it’s something that they can use in their skill sets as project managers as they continue forward
• SBDC (Small Business Development Centers) have a very strong demand for a modified lean Launchpad curriculum program for Main Street businesses. The individual Small Business Development Centers are doing the best they can to come up with a “just getting started” program. They’re all unique. They could benefit from what universities learned from the Lean Launchpad/Lean Startup approach
• Getting businesses online, giving them social media skills, coaching on the canvas, as a critical thing they were doing for Main Street businesses
• The teams aren’t done when they’re done with the class. In fact, they’re actually starting a real business during the class.

University Experiments

• At Ryerson the University incubators are open to entrepreneurs throughout the community, not just enrolled students.
• UT Rio Grande, where many students did not have access to good internet connections, improved their WiFi to extend it to their parking lots
• To graduate from the University of Buckingham, you must found a startup before you get your diploma. The startup doesn’t have to succeed. And if it fails early enough, you get to do another one
• We talked about a need to extend beyond the canonical I-Corps to post class curriculum to understand how the larger ecosystem can be part of that. We also talked about the need to track more than team activity more than just interviews. But to measure engagement with mentors and instructors. And the insights that come from those engagements

Hacking for the Environment and Oceans

• Real benefit in teaching smaller niche cohorts more focused on a specific problem area
• All of the coastal universities are finding that this methodology should have impact in these spaces
• These courses are more complex to put on than even Hacking for Defense type classes, because you’re trying to bring a diverse community together
• The types of sponsors are 1) nonprofits and from foundations, 2) Coastal Conservancy organizations 2) CEOs who hoping people will help them solve problems. 34) venture funds that are starting to be impact funds, particularly. It’s kind of a very diverse group.
• For anyone interested in offering this class see –https://www.commonmission.us/sustainability-and-prosperityhacking-for-environment-oceans

The video of the entire breakout session reports is below.

If you can’t see the video click here.

Summary
When the National Science Foundation stopped holding their annual conference of I-Corps instructors, it offered us the opportunity to embrace a larger community beyond the NSF – now to include the Hacking for Defense, NSIN, and Lean LaunchPad educators.

When we decided to hold the online summit, we had three hypotheses:

1. Educators would not only want to attend, but to volunteer and help and learn from each other – validated
2. Instructors would care most about effective communication with students (not tools, or frameworks but quality of the engagement with students) – validated
3. Our educator community valued ongoing, recurring opportunities to collaborate and open source ideas and tools – validated

A big thanks to Jerry Engel of U.C. Berkeley, the dean of this program. And thanks to our organizers The Common Mission Project which provided all the seamless logistical support, and sponsors VentureWell and GCEC and every one of the breakout room leaders:

Ali Hawks – Common Mission Project UK, Chris Taylor – Georgetown, Philip Bouchard – TrustedPeer, Jim Hornthal- UC Berkeley, Michael Marasco- Northwestern, Bob Dorf – Columbia, Tom Bedecarré – Stanford, Dave Chapman – University College London, Paul Fox – LaSalle Univ Barcelona, Phil Weilerstein – VentureWell, Stephanie Marrus – University of California, San Francisco, Jim Chung – George Washington University, Babu DasGupta -University of Wisconsin, Todd Warren – Northwestern, Jeff Reid – Georgetown, Micah Kotch – Urban-X, Radhika Malpani – Google, Todd Basche- BMNT, Todd Morrill – VMG

Join our educators slack channel here

Save the date for our next Educator Summit – June 3, 2021 online.