Behind The Scenes Of A Startup MOOC

In subsequent classes we reduced class size from ten teams to eight. This freed up time to get lecture and teaching time back in the classroom.
We manually took attendance of who watched our MOOC (later this year this will be an automated part of the LaunchPad Central software we use to manage the classes.)
To get the teaching team front and center, I required students to submit questions about material covered in the MOOC lecture they watched the previous evening. I selected the best questions and used them to open the class with a discussion. I cold-called on students to ensure they all had understood the material.
We developed advanced lectures which combined a summary of the MOOC material with new material such as lectures focused on domain-specific perspectives. For example, in our UCSF Life Sciences class the four VC’s who taught the class with me developed advanced business model lectures for therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices and digital health. (These advanced lectures are now on-line and available to everyone who teaches the class.)

The class, now taught as a hybrid flipped classroom, looks like this:

There’s still more to do.

While we use LaunchPad Central to have the teams provide feedback to each other, knowledge sharing across the teams still needs to be deeper and more robust.
While we try to give students tutorials for how to do Customer Discovery we need a better way to integrate these into the short time in quarter/semester.
While we insist that an MVP is part of the class, we need a more rigorous process for building the MVP in parallel with Customer Discovery

Outcomes

Besides finding the right balance in a flipped classroom, a few other good things have come from these experiments. The Udacity lectures now have over 250,000 students. They are not only used in my classes but are also part of other educators’ classes, as well as being viewed by aspiring entrepreneurs as stand-alone tutorials.

My experiments in how to teach the Lean LaunchPad class have led to a 2 ½ day class for 75 educators a quarter (information here.) And we’ve found a pretty remarkable way to use the Lean LaunchPad to organize corporate innovation/incubator groups. (We opened source our teaching guide we use in the classes here.)

Lessons Learned

Creating engaging MOOC’s are hard

Confirming that students watched the MOOC’s is even harder

The Flipped classroom needs to be balanced with:

Student accountability

Instructor time in front of the class

Advanced lectures

Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who blogs at SteveBlank.com