Teaching Entrepreneurship Through Science

When science undergraduate student and co-founder Scott Runacres took to the LaunchPad stage to pitch his bespoke adventure business, Vagabond, to a panel of leading entrepreneurs and a 100-strong audience, he wasn’t sure what the reaction would be.  

Vagabond is a collective of three students whose ambition is to share the beauty of Australia with the world through showcasing adventures of their own online, inspiring people to do their own adventures. They will also run weekend trips around Victoria and eventually week long expeditions between Melbourne and Sydney.

Scott and his co-founders, all students of the Bachelor of Science Advanced – Global Challenges (Honours), walked away from the inaugural LaunchPad night with much more than expected. The judges awarded them $4,000 and they scooped the audience choice award of $2,000. This money will help them to buy equipment and insurance to start offering trips this summer.  In addition, Vagabond were given the offer of mentoring from an established global travel company and have been asked to run a trip for The Henley Club.

The Vagabond team receive their award

The other enterprises funded on the night included Living Books (seed-containing books to promote family engagement around gardening and sustainability), Cocktail Cargo (a subscription service providing cocktails in a box) and The Conscious Wardrobe (an ethical clothing platform). Another enterprise called Bioquisitive, which has established a BioHacking community in Melbourne, also gained a lot of interest on the night.

The Conscious Wardrobe celebrate their award

The LaunchPad awards night was the culmination of the student's second year studies where they have been learning about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship alongside their science majors.

LaunchPad offered a unique opportunity to bring together a diverse community comprising students, alumni, supporters and staff from across Monash University, along with key industry figures and entrepreneurs. The high quality of the student pitches and the overall positive atmosphere of the night were praised by the judges, participants and audience alike.

Judging panellist and entrepreneur David Urpani said it was an “entertaining, educational and inspiring night”. David Urpani will be joining the course as entrepreneur in residence in 2016 when the students do a unit that emulates an incubator environment.

The Bachelor of Science Advanced – Global Challenges, the only Honours degree of its kind in Australia, aims to equip a small cohort of passionate and ambitious science students with the capacity to make change on the global stage.  Our students study science but in the wider context of entrepreneurship and business, meaning that they develop core skills and competencies such as leadership, science diplomacy and communications.

Combined with the skills and knowledge learned in their science major, they will be ready to step straight into a diverse range of roles, from policy makers and government advisors to industry business owners and leaders. This is made possible through their engagement with industry and key influencers throughout the degree course. Our students proactively undertake internships, mentoring and outreach initiatives as well as getting involved in intimate dialogues and masterclasses with inspirational leaders from across industry.

As part of their course the students also need to do two internships with a focus on leadership or entrepreneurship.  This summer many of our students will be undertaking internships across a broad range of social and scientific enterprises in far flung corners of the globe – from Papua New Guinea and Vietnam to the UK and India, to name a few.

Second year student Nigel Abello says being involved with the Global Challenges course is one of the “biggest things that has impacted his life to date”. Nigel is heading off this summer to Nepal undertaking an internship with a social enterprise enabling locals to become self-supporting through entrepreneurship. When he returns to Melbourne he will be completing a second internship with Picture the Coast, another social enterprise, undertaking a project to take the longest picture of the coast of Australia.

Through these internships Nigel says “I am keen to broaden my worldview and get a more direct understanding of how my understanding of science can impact communities around the world”.

Living Books were awarded a fellowship awarded by Leesa Charlotte of The Henley Club (center right) to attend the Global Ideas Conference

 As one of the Faculty involved in the course it is inspiring and rewarding to see the development of our student's capacity through their entrepreneurship studies.  Getting the opportunity to support students, like Scott, who dreams of taking his physiology major and becoming a social entrepreneur, express his purpose through his university assignments feels like we are bottling magic.  Who know where these dreams will next take them and who they may be able to impact.

Read More

Developing Authentic Assessment

Is anybody else getting tired of the discussions about raising the standards of our teaching?  I am!  Not because I don’t wholeheartedly agree that we need to improve teaching and learning through better delivery, but because I think this only tells half of the story.

To have educational impact teaching improvements need to be coupled with a change in our approach to assessment.  Brown et al. (1997) strongly emphasize that “if you want to change student learning then change the methods of assessment”.

Image Credit: Flickr UGL_UIUC CC

In research intensive universities we have traditionally focused on developing assessment relating to research skills.  This focus is reflected and encouraged through the research skills development framework.  If we had the available jobs in research science for all our graduates (coupled with a student desire to actually follow a research career) there would be nothing wrong with this approach, but this is clearly not the case.   The majority of our students will follow alternative pathways and we need to develop authentic assessment to reflect these pathways.

Authentic assessment described simply is the development of ‘real world skills’ in our students.  Using authentic assessment principles we need to first decide on who’s ‘real world’ we are thinking about.  Given only a small proportion of our students will become researchers, I believe that science assessment should enable the development of generic skills used by the wider workforce. When I talk about the real world I mean the one outside of academia. 

The research 

If your thinking about how to develop authentic assessment, I find the seven propositions in the OLT project Assessment 2020 provides useful guidance.  

Taking the ‘Assessment 2020’ propositions one step further is a recent paper by Ashford-Rowe et al. (2013) which defines eight critical elements of authentic assessment.  These elements suggest that authentic assessment should:

• Be challenging enough so that it reflects real world situations and tasks with a requirement to do more than just reproduce knowledge.
• Focus on the creation of a product (or performance) that demonstrates the application of skills and knowledge.
• Develop knowledge, skills or attitudes that are more widely applicable and transferable to situations outside of the assessment task. e.g. the knowledge should not be domain specific.
• Produce a product or performance that accurately reflects the needs of the real world.
• Use tools and tasks during the assessment that are reflective of real world situations.
• Give students the opportunity to receive sufficient feedback throughout the assessment process and provide feedback to the teacher.
• Give students the opportunity to collaborate with each other.
• Give students the opportunity to develop their own metacognition through self-reflection and evaluation.

Providing authentic experiences? Image credit: Flickr GlacierNPS CC

Putting it into practice

Using the principles of authentic assessment I developed an assessment task for my environmental monitoring unit.  In this assessment, the students had to contribute to citizen science projects of their choosing and then critique the scientific methodology and design of the experiment.  This gave them the opportunity to contribute to real science projects across national and international boundaries. The assessment task wasn’t perfect first time around, but the students seemed engaged and they made significant contributions to community projects.

While developing research skills is an example of authentic assessment and undoubtedly provides many useful skills in science students (e.g. critically evaluating information and developing arguments), I think that we need to get real about where our students end up and ensure that we pay appropriate attention in the curriculum to develop skills for them to succeed.

References

Ashford-Rowe K, Herrington J & Brown C  (2013)  Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education doi: 10.1080/02602938.2013.819566                   

Brown, G., J. Bull, and M. Pendlebury. 1997. Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education. London: Routledge

Rowan Brookes is a lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences.  She coordinates the Bachelor of Science Advanced - Global Challenges and the Bachelor of Environmental Science.  You can find her on Twitter @FutureSciEd or her webpage

                   

               

           

       

    

Read More