I enjoy teaching. But don't be fooled: if you are doing it right, you often wonder if you are challenging students with the right materials, the right questions, and the right feedback. And if you are a practitioner like me, you also worry that you are focusing on things students can REALLY use to bring their startup dreams to life. This winter, I am tackling a topic that I am wildly passionate about: tool illiteracy.
There is a gap between too many Rhode Island graduates and the skills they need to participate in a startup economy, whether as founders or employees. We often see these students in “top-of-the-funnel” activities but they rarely come out with viable ventures or the skills they need take a job within an innovation-focused company. And why are our graduates struggling to find placement within startups, even in non-technical job categories like management and marketing?
Turns out, new digital tools and techniques are transforming how people launch companies, find customers, and create thriving businesses. It's more than marketing: it's the toolkit and techno-literacy that every grad needs to launch a startup OR work for one. So, we built a class around it that will debut this winter at University of Rhode Island for J-Term, an innovative approach to winter term that compresses a full course into a 3-week intensive bootcamp.
The J-Term downside: students (and the instructor) sprint hard to achieve the goals. The upside: with classes every day, there's greater continuity and deeper retention, enabling the class to go deep into a topic. For this course, which the URI course catalogue lists as BUS 449: Entrepreneurship, students will learn the real language and tools of startups. We will explore products and techniques that drive startup success, put these tools into action, and learn from founders who have built successful companies. We will apply the digital tools and techniques that have become MUST-HAVES in today’s job market, and not just for marketers!
Students will be expected to utilize the tools, methods and approaches taught in the course on real business scenarios. This is the part I like the best! By completing this course, students can expect to establish a solid grounding in the latest startup tools and methodologies, gain experience in using these techniques with real business examples, and understand how these new tools and techniques are critical to any new graduate interested in launching a startup or working for one.
The course is part of a new program are pioneering at Founders League and Betaspring to build an army of young people as addicted to growth hacking as we are.
Registration for the course is open now, so if you know a student at URI, let them know!