Beyond Silicon Valley: Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies - The Greek Story

How do you reach international and local audiences at the same time to discuss entrepreneurship in a hands-on, practical way, offering an American university education experience and a face-to-face interaction with business experts from your community?
That was the question we posed when we first discussed a collaboration with Professor Michael Goldberg from Case Western Reserve University on a Massive Open Online Course.

The answer was: Go local! And go live!

So, we partnered with the ALBA School of Business and incubator Metavallon to offer a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the popular Coursera platform, with Greek localization, for the first time!
The course is designed and delivered by Prof. Goldberg, and offers insight into how entrepreneurial ecosystems are developed in economies that go through hardship and crisis. The course will also offer practical information on how aspiring and new entrepreneurs can identify and tap into resources from government and private funds, as well as get support from intermediary organizations and networks such as incubators and accelerators.

Prof. Goldberg will be using the example of Cleveland, Ohio and several other transitioning economies around the world, such as Vietnam and Turkey, to highlight the opportunities and hurdles in different entrepreneurial environments.

Instead of promoting an international online course to local audiences, Embassy Athens is adding the Greek paradigm to the international course. We have been working with our academic liaison from ALBA and with a professional film director and crew to develop a series of videos featuring Greek entrepreneurs, funding experts, government officials and others. Those videos will be part of the MOOC designed by Prof. Goldberg.

Our goal is to drive Greek MOOC participation with the Greek videos. But we also want to keep our local audience engaged through out the six-week course, and counter attrition rates, which can run as high as 80% on Coursera courses.

That is why we have scheduled a series of informal meetings and networking events in four different cities of Greece - Athens, Thessaloniki, Ioannina and Heraklion.

The meet-ups will feature additional footage from Greek interviewees, Q&A with the local academic liaison on the topics of the course, and guest speakers based on each week's theme. This will be an opportunity for us to learn more about the audiences who joined and about our MOOC experiment.

JOIN NOW at http://www.alba.edu.gr/ENTREPRENEURSH...