Building a new raft

In ordinary times, the classroom takes on a slight Survivor island atmosphere as guest entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to the 110 students in the Kenan-Flagler Business School’s New Ventures course.

It’s known as the Raft Debate. Students analyze the arguments and then vote for the most viable-sounding proposal by walking over to stand by their chosen entrepreneur or, as Professor Ted Zoller says, symbolically “climb on their raft.” The raft with the most people wins. The others go for a swim.

But these are not ordinary times.

One of many changes

The Raft Debate is one of many changes Zoller made as Carolina began delivering nearly 100% of its classes via remote learning. In fact, Zoller, the T.W. Lewis Clinical Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and faculty director of the Entrepreneurship Center, had to build a new raft. He and his team overhauled two courses in the Executive MBA program, modifying all of the content for digital delivery.

Ted Zoller.

New Ventures, with its 110 students, is one course. The other is the Entrepreneurs Lab, or ELab, with 85 students. Zoller says that the courses serve as both horse and jockey, with the first built around planning the venture, or “horse,” and the latter built around the developing the entrepreneurial leader, or “jockey.”

New Ventures students work with outside startup-company founders to develop their own ventures. The Executive MBA class ended March 24 after four successive Mondays of four-hour classes immersed students in the process of founding and funding a new business.

In ELab, Carolina graduate and undergraduate students engage with national thought leaders who have written important books about entrepreneurship while concurrently studying the career journeys of business founders, many of them Carolina alumni. They learn from the founders’ successes and failures, while building an entrepreneurial mindset.

To retool the courses for digital delivery, Zoller focused on two areas. First, his team and students developed or found online tools to replace former ways of communicating and completing assignments. Secondly, he changed teaching methods to more efficiently and fully engage visiting entrepreneurs, authors, thought leaders and founders of successful companies.

It seems everyone uses Zoom to videoconference, and Zoller’s classes are no different. But because he originally designed the courses to incorporate experiential pedagogy, or teaching methods, moving the student “experience” online presented a challenge. They videoconference for class sessions, team meetings, office hours with founders and daily consultations Zoller has with students.

The changes that Zoller and Program Coordinator Gabriella Ragouzeos made mid-semester were important, especially in classes where students usually build teams and share ideas face-to-face.

“Professor Zoller and Gabriella have been incredibly accommodating and innovative in coming up with ways to keep us connected,” said Anthony Schinelli, a chemistry major. “We have used Zoom, but the class projects that students have come up with for our weekly ‘grand challenges’ have changed drastically in super-creative ways and, frankly, the transition has showcased the ingenuity of the students.”

‘Sort of a three-ring circus’

Adapting a class that engages more than 100 people, 40 of whom are outside entrepreneurs volunteering as student coaches, wasn’t easy. “New Ventures was sort of a three-ring circus,” Zoller said.

To re-work a key part of New Ventures, Ragouzeos used Zoom’s breakout-room function. During class, students normally break out twice–in teams of founders or funders. They first meet with the startup companies with whom they’ll work during the semester. Next, they pitch their financial or business models. Instead of filling 10 rooms in the McColl Building, Ragouzeos placed the teams in Zoom breakout rooms to plan businesses that offer goods or services. Then the entrepreneurs joined teams to evaluate their plans and give feedback. As each team of four-to-five students pitched to an entrepreneur for 10 minutes with the coach giving 40 minutes of constructive feedback, Zoller dropped in to each breakout room to check the progress.

And, the surviving raft stayed afloat when students climbed aboard by choosing the winner’s Zoom room.

‘I’ve learned even more’

Zoller said that ELab’s change to remote learning meant cancelling all travel for featured speakers. “We had arranged travel for all the thought leaders and authors, and we modified the class quite a lot, but every single person was generous in coming in via Zoom instead.”

While learning from a diverse set of entrepreneurs, students transformed what was formerly an in-class exercise into online team building. Students researched the biographies and career paths of each featured thought leader with an online visualization tool and then posed questions for Zoller to ask in an interview. And, they had to be prepared to discuss each founder’s background during the Zoom class with that person.

“I was in the first group that created class activities after the switch to online instruction,” said Dimple Mahadeshwar, a statistics and analytics major. “It was definitely an adjustment to work on everything online and collaborate that way. At first, working with my group felt a little more disorganized than meeting in person, but we learned a lot about teamwork through the process. I learned even more about how important it is to be clear about what you are saying and listen carefully to others.”

‘Might even be better than the old way’

Before social distancing, Zoller found that students want to know the people and their perspectives. “They would go up to the founders physically and begin talking,” he said. “Now, we’ve made online office hours with founders available for the students so they can talk afterwards. That’s one way to get the social network going.”

Zoller also found new ways for ELab students to complete three important assignments: a self-evaluation; a Summiting Canvas that maps each student’s path to their career summit; and a Journey Map to their dream life, which anticipates big breakouts and failures.

They switched the Journey Map development to Google tools and used online self-evaluation from Indigo Education Company and Gallup Business Profiles instead of PowerPoint to assess their strengths, weaknesses and personal approach to entrepreneurship. For oral exams at midterm and finals, students demonstrated their progress via video.

“We’ve made it much more of a milestone-based incremental deliverable that they develop throughout the course,” Zoller said. “The students are deep into self-assessment and development, which leads them to define their superpowers, steppingstones, their first job experiences and base camps, side hustles, then their ultimate job summit.”

Meanwhile, ELab students research ventures in their area of interest, modifying their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles to reflect their entrepreneurship focus. They also curate other social media channels to find news and information that might help them pursue their interests.

“ELab has been an intense face-to-face social engagement model. It’s kind of career services on steroids, and we’ve been able to work that out through social media tools and refinements of the pedagogy,” Zoller says. “I would argue that it might even be better than the old way.”