[nl]

Is there any information about how the class will work?

The non-virtual version of this class is heavily team based, and people are expected to go and find customers and actually talk to them(!). The workload is also quite heavy - I believe around 20 hours per week.

How will the team part work for the online class?

Edit: also, on the off chance anyone is thinking about teams already, I'd be interested in talking.

[sblank]

Not sure if I'm smart enough to figure out how to make teams work virtually for 1,000's of thousands of students at a time. (Can't figure out how to grade progress on this scale.)

I'm leaning to have the class teach individual entrepreneurs the basics of how to build a startup using the business model canvas, customer development and agile engineering.

Think of it as a step-by-step guide to building a startup. An advanced version of the Four Steps to the Epiphany updated for web/mobile/cloud, etc.

Thoughts?

[bravura]

You could have other students do collaborative "grading" for certain assignments, much like students vote on which questions get asked.

For example, the assignment is to pick a method for reaching customers. I describe my business and propose five methods for reaching clients. To get feedback, I then have to vote on five other student's ideas about how they would reach clients.

Whichever method the students choose is the best for me, I have to do.

Students can also note which ideas for reaching clients seem particularly good or particularly poor. You can cull the top of these annotations to discuss the ones of broadest use for the class to understand.

I think the principles of your approach are simple enough (and that's a good thing) that for basic grading you could crowdsource it. It's not as good as being able to pick your brain, but it's still pretty good. You could then use the voting method to find the biggest wins and the most useful fail-cases to discuss in class.

[nl]

"he only way I can think of to grade like that is to quote "The Social Network": I need the algorithm they use to rank chess players

Get the teams to rank each other, then apply the ELO algorithm?

[caw]

I signed up to see what it'll be like.

I took an entrepreneurial class that sounds like this at Georgia Tech, run by Merrick Furst (who has now started up the an incubator of sorts => http://flashpoint.gatech.edu). The course was team based, go out and iterate. Every time to class you found out what you did wrong over the past week so you'd go and redo part of it.

I suspect this course is going to be rather similar, but different perspectives are always good.