Assignment:
After your students have built teams, ask each team to come up with a list of 3-5 people they think would be good candidates to invite to your hub. These could be alumni or others in their network with an interest in supporting innovation. Once they’ve come up with a list, ask them to email these contacts (cc’ing you) to ask if they’d like to join the hub and contribute their expertise to the class. Give your students guidance on how to craft an effective email. And for any of the contacts that respond saying they would like to join, invite them to the hub and keep a list with their email addresses.
Once they’ve joined the hub, the best way to sustain their engagement is to call on them to respond to student posts at specific moments. For example, if you’ve asked your students to post ideas or questions by a particular due date, then you should message your support members after that due date comes and invite them to take the next day to respond to the posts they find interesting.
This exercise has the dual benefit of giving your students practice reaching out to people to aid and advise them and building out your ecosystem to make it more dynamic.
Summary:
- Each team comes up with a list of 3-5 advisors they’d like to invite to the hub
- The teams email the people on their list to invite them to the hub
- The instructor adds anyone who responded in the affirmative to the hub
- The instructor calls on these advisors at particular times to respond to student work
Objective(s):
- Teach students how to reach out to potential advisors and build their comfort doing so
- Add advisors to the hub and draw on their expertise to improve student work