As teaching in the new academic year gets into full swing and summer rays start to disappear, results from the Student Feedback Survey for the INCiTE Summer School (hosted this year in Da Nang, Vietnam), have just been released by the University’s Study and Work Away Service (SWAY) team within Edinburgh Global. And here is something you don’t always get from student evaluations: the Summer School received an Overall Satisfaction score of 100%! How did we achieve that?
First, a little about the INCiTE Summer School. The programme launched in 2019 as a partnership of four globally leading universities: The University of Edinburgh, The University of Sydney, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, and University of Amsterdam. In 2024, the Summer School brought together around 120 students and 20 members of staff from these four universities as well the National University of Management (Cambodia) and Duy Tan University (Vietnam) that hosted the Summer School.
Over a two-week period, students learn about intercultural competence, design thinking, and entrepreneurship, and work in multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural groups to ideate, build and pitch a business model for a sustainable solution to a global challenge that they have identified locally in the host country. This year, I co-led the entrepreneurship stream alongside Dr. Bonnie Stanway from the University of Sydney.
To deliver an applied course like that, in basically five lessons, is exciting even as it is challenging. In our case, we drew on the Double Diamond design model and organised the lessons around (1) Discovering and, (2) Defining problems, then (3) Developing and (4) Delivering solutions to such problems, with the fifth lesson focusing on the fundamentals of pitching. Each of these lessons entailed a quick introduction to useful templates, frameworks and tools to aid understanding and commence application. We then held clinics with the students as they got on with the job of identifying a global problem locally and developing an entrepreneurial solution for it.
By the end of the two weeks, we had inter-culturally competent students working as new friends and colleagues showcasing their newly gained proficiency in design, systems thinking and entrepreneurship at a grand marketplace event. Effuse with camaraderie, good vibes and future promise, students pitched over twenty truly global sustainable business or social enterprise ideas to assessors, summer school and Duy Tan University staff, and fellow students.
But while we knew we had delivered a good programme, you only get to know for sure how students truly felt about your course through the anonymous evaluation, especially the free text bits. Asked to indicate what learnings gained impacted them the most from the entrepreneurship classes, one student remarked “the man was funny”, while others highlighted, “just how much you can get done in under two weeks”, or “very useful, good toolkits that I can use forever” and “different tools that you can use not only for developing a company”. This underscores the beauty of modern applied entrepreneurship education; that it can help make you entrepreneurial without necessarily making you a startup entrepreneur.
To be sure, students were not the only ones learning and we weren’t the only ones teaching. Working with colleagues from other global universities meant that we could share some best practice on teaching, learning and assessment and am very keen to apply some of these in my courses this year. Further, it was hugely insightful to see intercultural competency, systems thinking, and entrepreneurship, subjects that are not traditional sister modules as such, come together to make a beautiful coherent whole.
But one of my most profound takeaways from the summer school was inspired by the cultural immersion activities the programme entailed out with the core courses. And I am not talking about sampling egg coffee or avocado coffee, or having noodles and shrimp for breakfast, or the thrill of road crossing that demands a skillful dart through a mesmeric melee of a million mutant mopeds.
I am talking about lessons given by local Vietnamese folk on how to slice reeds and weave sleeping mats, how to roast purple rice tea to a perfect pop without charring it, how to angle a chisel right in wood carving, or how to boil a proper pho broth. These classes by locals and our applied entrepreneurship course by academics from Edinburgh and Sydney had one common approach: scaffolding. They all entailed a basic introduction to core concepts, equipping students with tools, a bit of formative support, embracing early mistakes, then standing back and on hand as the students cheerfully ran with it.
I am grateful to the University for the opportunity to partake in such an enriching experience, to Duy Tan University for being such generous hosts, and to my INCiTE colleagues and students, and acquaintances made in Vietnam for the wonderful memories. Big kudos too to the Study and Work Away Service that does such fantastic international mobility facilitation for students and staff.
Learn more about the INCiTE Summer School
Learn more about the Study and Work Away Service
Do also check out our student blog: Discovering Vietnam: Rowetta's unforgettable experience at INCiTE Summer School
Samuel Mwaura is our Lecturer in Entrepreneurship & Innovation.