Abstract:

In the early months of 2020, a highly contagious strain of the respiratory disease COVID-19 emerged in China and rapidly spread around the globe posing complex challenges for many sectors. To contain the virus and minimize the spread, a number of regulations were imposed which forced people to minimize their social contacts. With universities responding by relocating students to a virtual environment, lectures and courses had to be adapted without losing a certain level of interactivity. Especially for universities this meant to transform the more practically oriented sessions to interactive virtual experiences. This paper should therefore describe a didactical framework designed in order to replace an entrepreneurial study tour to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. The focus was placed on providing the students with the unique opportunity to form meaningful connections and expand their professional network internationally. In an interactive and innovative combination of synchronous and asynchronous teaching sessions, the students had the unique opportunity to meet some of the most successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and discuss about current topics of interest. The aggregated theoretical information together with experiences and insights collected in the meetings are afterwards documented and gathered in a whitepaper. This framework serves as an example for how to design virtual study tours and may be adapted and applied in different fields and study programs.

Keywords:

Education Design, Virtual Study Tours, Entrepreneurship Curriculum, Leadership and Management in Uncertain Times.