Portal:Social entrepreneurship/Ideas for Planning Phases

When trying to build networks of educators, learners or institutions focused on some potentially unfamiliar topic such as social entrepreneurship, the following might be useful questions to ask and actions to take in the process:

Questions

• Do the relevant educators understand what social entrepreneurship is?

(it took me quite a while to reach my current level of understanding and I am still learning)

• Have we really identified the right people to use and improve/extend the wiki?
  • Are they already working on/with social entrepreneurship curricula/syllabi with a view to running courses?
  • We actually do have a few, but do they have the time and resources to engage with the process in parallel to those of the institution(s) to which they are attached?
• Do we understand how best to build social entrepreneurship around existing courses?
• Where this is figured out, do we know how best to augment the existing courses in ways which are compatible and harmonious with existing processes and systems in the institution?

My feeling is that most of the courses actually being offered in SA universities are around "outreach" and community-based learning or services-based learning, which provide important learning experiences and good career paths for some registrants, and such people are needed in the "developing" world.

Social Entrepreneurship is also needed, but I suspect this is really for a smaller percentage of people - the innovators and those who like to go beyond their comfort zones and make unexpectedly significant positive impacts on society. Social Entrepreneurship should be an "elective" as an add-on to such courses for the really dedicated aspiring real social entrepreneurs.

Actions

The above suggest some possible actions:

1. A learning activity for educators about what social entrepreneurship is and how to "teach" or facilitate the development of aspiring social entrepreneurs.
2. A similar learning exercise around Open Educational Resources.
3. A hands-on workshop with identified champions, preceded with an e-mail run through of the curriculum. The workshop could be similar to Learning4Content but focused on social entrepreneurship on Wikiversity and how the participants will use it to augment their activities at work. At the very least, this process should result in collections of activities for specific sets of students at various points on the curriculum.
4. Where possible, set up MoUs with the collaborating institutions, and show some level of co-investment. The institution should provide a champion who will work with us as part of their job (i.e. an educator in charge of a course closely related to social entrepreneurship). A possible output from each institution could be a document on the successes and learning while engaging in this process in parallel to their existing processes, systems and curricula. The document will include links to the case studies and other contributions to the learning resources on Wikiversity (or elsewhere).
5. Include some "hand-holding" while the educators first start using the wiki at work - e-mail address, mailing list, discussion forum or (watched) wiki page to people who can help immediately.
6. Activities to grow the network and harmonise with other international initiatives.
7. Establish a process for interested and affected parties to pose questions, suggest actions and participate in the planning.

See Also

• Evaluation Framework for Student Social Entrepreneurship - from a comprehensive perspective may suggest other questions to ask and actions to plan.