UGCE launches two International Virtual Classrooms on Entrepreneurship

The University of Groningen Centre of Entrepreneurship launches two International Virtual Classrooms on Entrepreneurship this week.

This week, a year of preparation and development, the International Virtual Classroom (IVC) on Entrepreneurship has launched across the ten universities of the LISTO project. LISTO project is a partnership among ten universities from Latin America and Europe, supported by the Erasmus+ funds. The program aims to enable students from Argentina, Brazil, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay share their experiences for five weeks, giving them the possibility to learn about entrepreneurship in an international, virtual environment.

The program focuses on using entrepreneurship and innovation as mechanisms to address global societal challenges. The UG is currently involved in two of the three pilot classrooms: Recognizing Global Opportunities and Navigating Global Networks and Ecosystems. Each course has an online international format with five virtual weekly meetings during March and April. Although the format is online, it is not a MOOC, but a live interaction across six or seven local classrooms connected into a virtual large class. Currently, there are about 50 students in each of the classrooms, and ten people of international staff lecture in the courses.

For the University of Groningen students, classes take place at the UGCE building in the Start-up city complex. Students attend the virtual class in a high-tech media room equipped with the Polycom system. It gives them the possibility to meet locally with other Groningen students and virtually with all other students and teachers involved in the course in other countries. Both kick-off classes went well, providing ample opportunity for interaction, learning, smiles and jokes. Participants found it very inspiring to see how technologies can be combined on university, classroom and work group levels: during the class the students had to make assignments both, in the local and in international (using messenger) teams, combine paper and media deliverables, and participate in online class conversations across seven universities. Next week, one of the classes will continue to discuss the signals of technological disruptions in health, sustainability, education, agriculture and smart cities, while the other will go deeper in analyzing the local entrepreneurship support ecosystem for the global case in energy transition written specifically for this course.

At UG, the program is coordinated and delivered by the team of the UG Center of Entrepreneurship, prof. dr. Aard Groen, dr. Olga Belousova, dr. Inna Kozlinska and drs. Lilian Hoff. Learn more about the LISTO project.