Reflection – Learning Launch 

 Challenge & Selection 

 As part of a student organization I ran a project to familiarize students of our university to the topic   of social entrepreneurship . As it was a group effort I will generally speak of “ us ” and “ we ” . We   decided to establish a series of workshops where participating students would be challenged to   explore areas of problems , come up with possible solutions , test those solutions and finally create a   business model that contributes to the solution of their chosen problem as well as sustain itself   ( basically they would use the design thinking process as well ) . After we have outlined this broad   concept as well as several ideas and content for the workshops , we wanted to receive feedback if   our ideas create value for them . For this reason , we decided to conduct a pilot workshop – which in   this course was described as a learning launch . In other words , we would run one workshop with a   small group of invited students ( we selected them according to persona profiles ) , including the   elements we wanted feedback on . 

 Tool Application 

 The first step towards our learning launch was to come up with the elements we wanted to include   in this pilot workshop . Some members had already participated in similar workshops , so we included   mostly elements we had not experienced ourselves before as well as the elements we believed   would work differently with our group of participants . From all this elements we designed a three   hour long workshop for roughly 8 to 12 participants . It turned out that we would focus on generating   business ideas on a set of given problems . Elements would be different brain storming techniques   ( triggering diverging thinking ) as well as frameworks to evaluate those ideas afterwards ( triggering   converging thinking ) . 

 A second step was to choose our participants . For this we used a set of personas we have come up   and used in an earlier stage of our project . Already approaching potential participants was part of   the experiment and we would document their behaviour or responding and trying to find out why   they rejected to participate or why they were willing to participate . We already could use this   information to improve our personas and get a first idea how we have to communicate if we would   scale up the project after the learning start . 

 The third step finally was the execution of the workshop . The team would split tasks : While half of us   would be moderating and facilitating the workshop , the others would observe and document what ’s   happening . After the workshop was finished , we sent out a survey to all the participants to collect   further data . 

 Insight 

 This above described learning launch was two things for us : a lot of fun and extremely useful . It was   very helpful for us to see with our own eyes what ideas worked , what inspired but also what created   confusion and disengagement . In retrospect , we realized that with our intuitive distinction between   workshop activities we already knew and the ones we only read about in secondary sources was   basically a distinction between existing data and new data , and the learning launch helped us to   validate these concepts . Through the learning launch we also learnt things we were not expecting .   For example what kind of food / snacks they wanted to have . Generally the most valuable learnings   came from observations . For example one observation was , that groups voluntarily decided to skip   some of the breaks because they were so involved in their work , which served as very good feedback 

 for that task , while on other activities we could observe that groups were always finished before   time and not having a high - quality result . 

 Approach 

 We have been quite content with our first learning launch . It was definitely the right tool at that   point in time . But there were a couple of things we could do better the next time . One possibility   would be to follow the learning launch process outlined by Bine in one of the video more   stringently and applying a more structured approach compared to our rather intuitive approach . This   would include to design more specific tests for each element / activity in our workshop , rather than   just do the workshop and observe what happens . This would have helped us to make sure that we   receive the exact data we needed . 


EMAIL: 
ID_NUM: 
NAME_STUDENT: 
PHONE_NUM: 
STREET_ADDRESS: 
URL_PERSONAL: 
USERNAME: 

### Task: You are a PII (Personal Identity Information) Detection. Given a essays written by students, you have to identify ONLY the following:
NAME_STUDENT - The full or partial name of a student that is not necessarily the author of the essay. This excludes instructors, authors, and other person names.
EMAIL - A student’s email address.
USERNAME - A student's username on any platform.
ID_NUM - A number or sequence of characters that could be used to identify a student, such as a student ID or a social security number.
PHONE_NUM - A phone number associated with a student.
URL_PERSONAL - A URL that might be used to identify a student.
STREET_ADDRESS - A full or partial street address that is associated with the student, such as their home address.
### Input: Reflection – Learning Launch 

 Challenge & Selection 

 As part of a student organization I ran a project to familiarize students of our university to the topic   of social entrepreneurship . As it was a group effort I will generally speak of “ us ” and “ we ” . We   decided to establish a series of workshops where participating students would be challenged to   explore areas of problems , come up with possible solutions , test those solutions and finally create a   business model that contributes to the solution of their chosen problem as well as sustain itself   ( basically they would use the design thinking process as well ) . After we have outlined this broad   concept as well as several ideas and content for the workshops , we wanted to receive feedback if   our ideas create value for them . For this reason , we decided to conduct a pilot workshop – which in   this course was described as a learning launch . In other words , we would run one workshop with a   small group of invited students ( we selected them according to persona profiles ) , including the   elements we wanted feedback on . 

 Tool Application 

 The first step towards our learning launch was to come up with the elements we wanted to include   in this pilot workshop . Some members had already participated in similar workshops , so we included   mostly elements we had not experienced ourselves before as well as the elements we believed   would work differently with our group of participants . From all this elements we designed a three   hour long workshop for roughly 8 to 12 participants . It turned out that we would focus on generating   business ideas on a set of given problems . Elements would be different brain storming techniques   ( triggering diverging thinking ) as well as frameworks to evaluate those ideas afterwards ( triggering   converging thinking ) . 

 A second step was to choose our participants . For this we used a set of personas we have come up   and used in an earlier stage of our project . Already approaching potential participants was part of   the experiment and we would document their behaviour or responding and trying to find out why   they rejected to participate or why they were willing to participate . We already could use this   information to improve our personas and get a first idea how we have to communicate if we would   scale up the project after the learning start . 

 The third step finally was the execution of the workshop . The team would split tasks : While half of us   would be moderating and facilitating the workshop , the others would observe and document what ’s   happening . After the workshop was finished , we sent out a survey to all the participants to collect   further data . 

 Insight 

 This above described learning launch was two things for us : a lot of fun and extremely useful . It was   very helpful for us to see with our own eyes what ideas worked , what inspired but also what created   confusion and disengagement . In retrospect , we realized that with our intuitive distinction between   workshop activities we already knew and the ones we only read about in secondary sources was   basically a distinction between existing data and new data , and the learning launch helped us to   validate these concepts . Through the learning launch we also learnt things we were not expecting .   For example what kind of food / snacks they wanted to have . Generally the most valuable learnings   came from observations . For example one observation was , that groups voluntarily decided to skip   some of the breaks because they were so involved in their work , which served as very good feedback 

 for that task , while on other activities we could observe that groups were always finished before   time and not having a high - quality result . 

 Approach 

 We have been quite content with our first learning launch . It was definitely the right tool at that   point in time . But there were a couple of things we could do better the next time . One possibility   would be to follow the learning launch process outlined by Bine in one of the video more   stringently and applying a more structured approach compared to our rather intuitive approach . This   would include to design more specific tests for each element / activity in our workshop , rather than   just do the workshop and observe what happens . This would have helped us to make sure that we   receive the exact data we needed .
### Output: 