Online Course for Graduate Students:

Intro to EdTech Entrepreneurship

This is a graduate level course for students interested in the business of education technology. I
helped design and manage this as a face-to-face DMDL course last spring in collaboration with
adjunct faculty member and edtech entrepreneur Jonathan Harber. At the time, we didn’t use an
LMS, so I recreated some of topic sequence, assignments, and content using the structure of
the Canvas LMS.

Background

Jonathan is the chairman of StartEd, a startup accelerator for edtech companies that is affiliated
with NYU Steinhardt. The accelerator connects founders with venture capitalists for mentorship
and, in 2017, the entire experience was filmed.

In the summer of 2018, I worked with Jonathan to develop the raw footage into a series of case
studies about each company. These case studies became the course material for the Edtech
Entrepreneurship course in the DMDL program, for which I served as Jonathan’s teaching
assistant. We distributed these case studies using a website called Synapse, which was not
built for this purpose. (Synapse is designed to manage a course development process, not
deliver the course). For the actual assessment, communication, and general course
management we originally used Google Suite.

Below is a screenshot of our case study for Wonda VR, which we distributed via Synapse.
Learning Goals

Students will be able to...

● Apply the four key lenses to evaluate an edtech company, i.e. (4Ps) problem, people,
product, progress by discussing company cases with peers.

● Carry out calculations that determine the value of a company and ownership distribution
by providing correct answers to various examples.

● Analyze a company as an investment opportunity by providing evidence from authentic

company documents and independent research.

● Create a case study on a company using key concepts introduced throughout the
course, such as Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAQ).

Learning Theories

Worked Examples​ present a problem and provide the steps to solve that problem. This can be
an effective teaching method in complex domains such as analyzing patient cases by doctors in
training. Reviewing video of discussion about patient cases provide learners with a kind of
worked example that they can transfer to future cases (Renkle 2014).

The case study videos in our Edtech Entrepreneurship course provide a similarly complex
domain. Through videos in the case studies, students watch investors and other leaders in the
field discuss the merits of each company through such lenses as the companies sales strategy,
market approach, and leadership background. While there is no right or wrong answer and the
final solution is presently unknowable, students will learn heuristics that can be applied to other
cases and help them make decisions in the future.

Sources

Iowa State University. Retrieved Nov 12, 2019.​ Revised Bloom's Taxonomy.​
http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/effective-teaching-practices/revised-blooms-taxonomy/

Renkl, A. (2014). 16 The Worked Examples Principle in Multimedia Learning. ​The Cambridge
handbook of multimedia learning,​ 391.