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Keynote sessions
Professor Sally Brown and Professor Kay Sambell
Making assessment future fit: ensuring authentic assessment approaches in the light of Coronavirus changes to HE practice
In Spring 2020, a dramatic hiatus in Higher Education assessment occurred globally, caused by the closing of campuses due to Coronavirus-19 triggering dramatic changes in assessment practices, particularly seeking alternatives to face-to-face on-site exams. We supported this work through three widely-used and well-received publications covering what could be implemented instead immediately, what kinds of replacements could be offered, (e.g. open-book exams), and what more enterprising and authentic forms of assignment could be adopted which are likely also to have benefits for learners. Our keynote will trace these phases and prompt discussion on how we can ensure that we never return to former poor practices, offering instead alternatives that genuinely contribute to student learning.
References
Sambell, K. and Brown, S. (23 March 2020) ‘Contingency-planning: exploring rapid alternatives to face-to-face assessment’.
Sambell, K. and Brown, S. (2 April 2020) ‘Fifty tips for replacements for time-constrained, invigilated on-site exams’
Sambell, K. and Brown, S. (1 June 2020) ‘The changing landscape of assessment: some possible replacements for unseen time-constrained face-to-face invigilated exams’
Click here for Kay and Sally’s Covid-19 Assessment Collection
Paul Coyle
Influencing change – the power of the entrepreneurial mindset (no slides)
As the new academic year approaches, champions of enterprise and entrepreneurship are facing numerous challenges. How can you go beyond just coping with the current uncertainty? How can you influence change within your organisation at this crucial time? In this session, you will discover how an entrepreneurial mindset will help you to find practical answers to these questions. For example, we will consider the role of risk taking in influencing change. The session will include the results from the MINDSET Tool which you are encouraged to complete in advance of the conference.
Julienne Shields
Rescripting start-up and incubation support in response to Covid-19
As entrepreneurship educators, we take embracing ambiguity seriously as a way of boldly advancing entrepreneurship education. In 2020, numerous entrepreneurship centers quickly and successfully pivoted to deliver pitch competitions and connectivity with funding groups online. This includes increasing alumni and community engagement as well as positively adjusting student engagement. Discover how large and small entrepreneurship programs bootstrapped new programming in Spring of 2020, and leverage their lessons learned for future programming.
Policy 2020
Alison Price, Head of Policy, EEUK
In an essential policy catch-up, EEUK will be reminding you of the key changes that have taken place this year and pick out what to keep an eye on next year. With links to supporting resources, this short overview aims to directly engage you in policy, highlighting the key things you need to know to start the new academic year fully briefed. This session will close by identifying the policy themes for next year and with a reminder of your role in ensuring that EEUK remains ‘the voice of the sector’.
Research Findings – The Reality of being an enterprise educator
Dr Emily Beaumont, President Elect, EEUK
During 2020, EEUK have been conducting stage one of our research project; The reality of being an enterprise and entrepreneurship educator. The project utilises EEUK’s three Fellowship pathways; Academic, Practitioner, and Influencer and their aligned IOEE standards as ideal types, providing a means of comparison with concrete reality in order to reveal the significance of the reality. In this session we discuss the initial findings from stage one (an online quantitative survey), further data analysis required, and the potential of stage two.
Case Studies and PechaKucha Presentations
Wednesday 9th September 2020
101 Gamifying Entrepreneurship and Innovation Pedagogy with Escape Rooms
Ali Ahmad and Kim Watts, University of Warwick
There is a growing movement within educational disciplines to use gamification to improve students’ overall learning experience. One of the strategies being used for gamifying the classroom learning environment is the “escape room”. Escape rooms are popular recreational activities available to competing groups with varying degrees of complexity and immersion. When the method is deployed in the classroom, it can be defined as ‘action orientated, time-bound and team-based games organized in various stages where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal’. In this session, we will critically evaluate our experiences when designing and deploying the “PharmaLogic: Innovation Challenge” at WMG, University of Warwick by referring to outputs of peer and student evaluations, alignment with module learning outcomes and the pedagogic value of the approach when teaching entrepreneurship and innovation at the Masters level.
102 Understanding and acting on curiosity
Leigh Morland, University of Huddersfield
This session reviews the design, delivery and assessment of a module entitled The Curious Mindset, offered to M-Level Business Management candidates. It explores the module from the perspectives of participants and tutor in terms of: 1. The association with enterprise education and rationale for design; 2 Learning practices to support ideation and opportunity formation; 3 The use of exhibitions and events as formative assessments, for the purpose of self- reflection and articulating opportunities. Findings note the importance of participants and tutors acting on own curiosities, in order to co-create meaningful learning experiences and to prepare for further studies in new venture creation.
Pauline Bremner and Chris Moule, Robert Gordon University
Keeping students’ skills sets work ready is a challenge for all universities within their degree programmes. Often skills are embedded in module descriptors, hard to identify and hard for students to relate to the outside world. At the Robert Gordon University the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group have been working closely with the Scottish Institute for Enterprise to embed the Scottish Innovative Student Awards (SISA) Programme into many degrees across the institution. Our university is now the first university in Scotland with self-accreditation status for level one of SISA https://www.sie.ac.uk/sisa/ . This session will briefly outline the programme, highlight how we have embedded it into RGU and outline the benefits to both the university and students for their future career focussing on the whole person education ideology. This collaboration aids the whole person education perspective in many ways and students view SISA as an added value proposition, developing innovative and future ready skills.
104 Research Communications – why it matters and how to do it
Lauren Sosdian, Oxentia
1. The benefits of research communication to academia include: interdisciplinary collaboration, academic creativity, increased opportunities to commercialise research and, consequently, higher chances for researchers to transition to careers in business entrepreneurship. 2. Research communication requires skills. There are several tips and tools to face the challenges of communicating academic research to non-specialist audiences. All these can be transformed into exercises to practice for successful research communication. The talk will consider, among others: a. the sounding board exercise, i.e. explaining research to a colleague from another field; b. the twitter pitch, i.e. explaining the relevance of one’s research in 28- characters; c. the jargon-free pitch; d. storytelling. 3.The talk will explain the common blockers preventing PhD students from seeing meaning in their research beyond academia. Based on our training experience, we will show that research communication skills encourage researchers to explore the creation of startups based on their findings, and to look for careers in business.
105 BAME students become entrepreneurs by overcoming Challenges and Barriers
Shehla Khan, University of Wales Trinity St David
Certificate in Higher Education Skills for the Workplace program is a unique course that enables students to gain a university qualification in management and Leadership by responding to a gap in the market of being able to engage with mature students who have previously been disengaged from education system. This course has attracted mainly an audience from BAME communities and primarily women who had to give up education and careers in the past due to cultural issues through its flexible approach and extra support catering to their specific needs. This programme provides them with an opportunity to develop their awareness of enterprise and develop skills through the modules delivered in the program focussing overtly on enterprise skills through its practical approach. This enabled them to gain confidence which has helped them to overcome barriers including cultural, emotional and physical such as facing racial discrimination, which have held them back previously.
Thursday 10th September 2020
201 Assessing the Impacts of Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Education
Matthew Rogers-Draycott, Royal Agricultural University and Kelly Smith, University of Birmingham
This session will explore outputs from the EERPF funded Impact Project, focusing on impact testing approaches in enterprise and entrepreneurial education (in HEI’s). The session will start with a brief introduction to the research project detailing key processes, challenges and outcomes. We will then present a review of the results of our work focusing on insights drawn from policy and practice before closing with an overview of our insights including any practical advice we have to share on impact measurement.
202 SPERO. Providing hope for the future
Ruth Weir, University College London
The Latin translation of SPERO is “I Hope”. It is our hope to unleash the entrepreneurial mindset of UCL doctoral students through a series of experiential workshops. We offer UCL doctoral students:- The opportunity to view their research through an entrepreneurial lens – An arena to develop highly sort-after transferable skills; – A safe space to test newly learnt skills; -The knowledge base needed to develop novel social and commercial ventures;- Awareness of intellectual property and licencing opportunities at UCL;-An eco-system to meet like-minded peers;- A framework to perpetuate life-long learning and personal development. In this ever changing, unpredictable world, not only is our programme fit for the future, our doctoral students will be too.
203 ScaleUp 360 / Supporting the Sheffield City Region
Darren Chouings and Kelli Parnham, Sheffield Hallam University
Our ScaleUp 360 programme has been providing tailored support to entrepreneurs and start-ups with the ambition and potential to scale up their business. Covid-19 has had serious impact on SMEs in our region and we have had to act quickly so that our content is relative to the situation we are now in. During this session we will talk about how the ScaleUp 360 programme quickly adapted so that it could support the local hospitality industry. We will talk through our internal collaborative approach to supporting the food sector and how we worked with key stakeholders to create new programmes of support quickly. Finally, we will discuss how Sheffield Hallam created ambitious student placement opportunities within local businesses and how clients of ScaleUp 360 benefited from our students’ skills, enthusiasm and knowledge when they really needed it.
204 Easily create custom online courses with LinkedIn Learning Path
Sylvia Jen and Justyna Turner, University of Salford
LinkedIn Learning is widely adopted across UK universities as an online learning resource, where staff and students can access its large library of exclusive video tutorials to develop new skills. It is not generally used as a platform to upload your own online courses, as that normally requires one to register as an instructor to create courses together with LinkedIn Learning. However, using LinkedIn Learning Path, it becomes possible to easily create your own custom courses with only administrative access to content curation. This presentation will showcase how, during the switch to digital offers, the Enterprise Team at the University of Salford created a custom online course using LinkedIn Learning Path, which was aimed at engaging non-interested students to guide them towards forging their own career paths. It will detail the different types of online resources that can be included, offering creative possibilities to develop your own customised online courses.
205 SSUW20 – a country wide collaboration (no slides)
Angus Philips, Cardiff and Vale College and Kelly Jordan, University of Swansea
Once upon a time in Wales, 11:45am Thursday 19th March 2020 to be precise and four days before lockdown – a simple email from the University of South Wales, to Enterprise Educators across Wales would change lockdown for them all! “Would anyone like to collaborate in delivering an online, pan Wales start-up week? ”The rest, as they say, is history…….Eleven and a half weeks later, through unprecedented collaboration between all 23 welsh HE and FE institutions across the country – 500 students; 23 entrepreneurial speakers and a 300+ strong Facebook community were in place. As Kelly Jordan from Swansea University hit the Zoom button, Summer Start-up Week 2020 went “live”. Join us to find out… – What happened next? – What did we learn in this new digital world? -What is the legacy of SSUW and who wants to be part of it?
206 Revaluing Enterprise Education in a Changing World
Gary Wood, University of Sheffield, Princy Johnson, Liverpool John Moores University and Ceri Batchelder, Royal Society/University of Sheffield
This presentation explores the role and value of enterprise education in the current Higher Education landscape, and in the midst and wake of the pandemic. We highlight the urgent need for enterprise education, and entrepreneurial approaches, to be at the heart of universities’ strategies for COVID-19 recovery and beyond. We argue that positioning enterprise education in this way is crucial for its resilience through these challenging times, but also in developing resilience in institutions, and our students and graduates. We suggest ways of achieving this, recognising the links between enterprise, entrepreneurship, and other core agendas and metrics of concern in HE. We will explore enterprise in research, teaching and learning, as well as outreach, knowledge exchange and industrial partnerships. Delegates will consider who bears responsibility for realising the considerable value that enterprise can offer us now, more than ever, and identify actions they can personally take in making it happen.
Friday 11th September 2020
301 Do women need more support to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas?
Katie Martin and Lauren Ellse, University of Bristol
The Alison Rose Review of female entrepreneurship found that only 1 in 3 UK start-ups is founded by a female, representing 1.1 million missing businesses. Analysis of the New Enterprise Competition (NEC) run by the Basecamp Student Enterprise Team at the University of Bristol showed a disproportionately low level of women participating. Barriers, perceptions, structure, and support were all analysed. In response, the Basecamp team added a 5-month support programme to the overall competition including mentoring and tailored business support. The extra support has been instrumental in building the confidence, networks, and business acumen of applicants. There has also been a vast improvement in the gender diversity of the competition, with seven of the ten finalist businesses founded or co-founded by women. Previously this has been as low as zero! Learn about our experiences and the small changes you can make to improve diversity in your programmes.
302 Student Innovation at Warwick
Rachel Davis and Lewis Beer, University of Warwick
During the first half of 2020, Warwick Enterprise undertook a research project to explore the question, ‘How do students engage with innovation?’ This involved in-depth discussions with members of staff across nearly all academic departments, resulting in a substantial internal report (c. 40,000 words) that details student and staff activity relevant to innovation, enterprise, and creativity. Warwick’s Innovation Strategy states that ‘all students should have the opportunity to engage with innovation’, and this consultation represents an important step in creating a genuinely inclusive culture of innovation. By learning more about innovation-related provision (both curricular and extra-curricular) in academic departments, we hope to showcase and develop existing opportunities, as well as fostering new interdisciplinary collaborations. In this session, we will share our experience of researching and compiling what is now a comprehensive and strategic web resource, explore our key learnings, and forecast the next steps for this ambitious project.
303 The unexpected benefits to student development of moving online
Ruth Donnelly, University of Edinburgh
Successfully transitioning a challenge-led experiential learning programme online confirmed that not only can students continue to develop their enterprise skills remotely, but the experience can deliver unexpected benefits in developing new skills, breaking down barriers and fostering community. This session will outline some of the key lessons we learnt in successfully moving the Students as Change Agents programme online, making it accessible to larger numbers of participants and addressing pressing challenges around youth homelessness and sustainably rebuilding Edinburgh’s tourism and festivals. We will highlight the serendipitous benefits of developing new skills vital to the future workplace, such as digital literacy, drive and the ability to collaborate remotely as well as the sense of community which developed between staff, students and external hosts, with barriers being broken down as everyone learnt together. We will touch on how this experience has already been used to influence more widely at the University.
304 My kitchen is a University
Stef Thorne, University of Suffolk
Universities are now kitchens, sheds, home offices, kid’s bedrooms, living rooms and corners of garages. Spaces to deliver or engage in enterprise education in 2020 are blurred with being the same places we live in, we eat in, we parent/care in and we isolate in. The global working from home experience pushes flexible working forward and an end to presenteeism which may engage more women in enterprise and entrepreneurship. This session will look at how the kitchen, a domestic space operating for many as their place of work and education (again!!), may be a site of opportunity and challenge and that reflecting on spaces for enterprise education will be key to ensuring it is fit for the future, inclusive and connected.
Helen Hook, University of Birmingham and Joe Trodden, JosephTrodden.com
For academia to keep curriculum design and delivery agile and fit for the future, engaging industry is essential. This Pecha Kucha will tell you the story of how Joe and Helen merged our worlds of academia and practitioner together, in order to co-design something truly unique for students undertaking the two final year modules ‘Learning Entrepreneurial Skills’ and Entrepreneurial Start Up’. You will hear about how they navigated the academic parameters, ensured constructive alignment and created ideas for authentic assessment, whilst keeping the content delivery creative and innovative. This session will allow delegates to hear: 1. Why? and How? the partnership began: hear Helen’s reasons for taking this approach and Joe’s on why he engaged. 2. The importance of collaborative provision: two-way learning, having a shared vision, benefits to students’ and academia. 3.How they used iterative design methodology to adapt the module with the Academic Lead. 4. Insight into the modules impact.
Showcase Sessions
306 Pitching resources (no slides)
Emma Forouzan, University of South Wales and Steve Aicheler, Cardiff Metropolitan University
A fear of pitching or poor technique frequently results in students and graduates not: -Showcasing their ideas to their full potential. – Gaining the investment they need. – Competing or being shortlisted in external competitions. To counteract this Cardiff Met, the University of South Wales and Cardiff University set out to develop a set of bilingual pitching videos focusing upon: – The 60 second pitch. – Pitching in groups. -Pitching for investment. – Dealing with questions. -Video pitching. A set of lesson plans have been developed to sit alongside the videos to enable staff to deliver pitching workshops and worksheets to allow students to work through the resources independently in their own time. The resources have been tested during lock down and are now ready to share across the network – Attend to find out how you can access them for free and utilise within your institutions.
307 Learning from the student voice (no slides)
Nina Lanzon, London South Bank University
Hear from LSBU students as they share their recent experiences of being involved in facilitated focus group discussions by LSBU’s Student Enterprise team. In this recorded session, we’ll outline how we’ve captured students’ thoughts and insights and placed the student voice at the heart of our offer for the next academic year, for greater impact and engagement.