Startup School innovates to start up entrepreneurial classes virtually

The agility and innovation of startup culture has been put into practice by the Startup School at Ryerson University as it shifts its classes online in response to COVID-19.

Startup School (external link) , a Zone Learning initiative at Ryerson, provides fundamental entrepreneurial education to aspiring and emerging entrepreneurs.  Founded by Dr. Sean Wise, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Ted Rogers School of Management, the school has delivered more than 60 free seminars, keynotes and working sessions for entrepreneurs over the past five years. 

“Our mandate at the Startup School is to serve students, so when it no longer became safe to host them in-person because of COVID-19, we thought online made the most sense,” says Cleo Pyke, Startup School Manager. The school’s first exclusively online session was on March 18, 2020.

Pyke says that aside from general testing of the technology and small glitches, it was not difficult to make the shift to online. “The biggest challenges were tracking the guests who actually ‘attended’ because people come in and out of the chat regularly; making sure people registered for the purposes of data collection; and dealing with any technological glitches that came up,” she explains.

“We decided that Google Hangouts was the best choice for us for a few reasons, namely that it was a free option available via Ryerson and we had the ability to record every session so that content can live forever,” says Pyke. “This [recording sessions] is already something we do and we wanted to be able to make sure that anyone who wanted to access the information would be able to.”

The virtual sessions that Startup School has run so far include 101 Ways to Successful Failure, Startup Social Media, How to Write a Business Plan, Customer Acquisition and Sales Training Workshop and Building a Community Around Your Product/Company. Registration for these five sessions totalled 1,147 registered attendees. And many more people are viewing these sessions on their website afterwards.

Pyke adds that making this transition to virtual learning also presented an opportunity. “This was a great pilot for offering Startup School in a digital format that can reach a wider audience overall,” she points out. The school has also started to offer its past sessions as podcasts (external link) . 

“Cleo and the great team at Ryerson’s Startup School rose to the challenge and now we are getting more live stream attendees than ever and our library of past speakers (external link)  is being widely used across the Ryerson entrepreneurship community,” says Dr. Wise, Executive Director of the Startup School.  The last five years of sessions are also available for free to the public.

The feedback from participants about the online Startup School sessions has been very positive. One student said, “Great online session. I really enjoyed the ability to interact with the presenters and the rest of the audience.  Awesome job!” And another student commented, “I love the webinar format. It made the session more accessible. I hope we can continue with this format.”