GE2 Hosts Professional Development Workshop

02/17/2021

The Global Entrepreneurship Exchange (GE2) program recently held a five-week virtual professional development workshop for 28 faculty and students from India and Cambodia.

Run in partnership with the Indo Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE), the workshop sessions covered the essential components of entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as how to engage and motivate students to learn entrepreneurship. 

“The workshop was very successful and will become another signature initiative in the expanding Global Entrepreneurship Exchange program,” says GE2’s founding director, Ashwin Mehta, an associate teaching professor of marketing, entrepreneurship and innovation (MEI).

Several MEI faculty members, including Prof. Yi Yang, Assoc. Prof. Michael Ciuchta and adjunct Bill Yelle, provided class activities, exercises and assignments during the three-hour sessions, which were held twice a week for five weeks. Manning School of Business Dean Sandra Richtermeyer also participated.

Fourteen faculty-student teams — 12 from universities in India and two from Cambodia — attended the workshop. Mehta says this was a key feature of the workshop, as the faculty and students were asked to make presentations to each other and provide feedback. 

“This helped faculty to teach in a simulated classroom environment and become comfortable,” says Mehta, who notes that 79% of participants rated the workshop as “extremely useful” and 95% said they would recommend the workshop to colleagues and friends. 

Mehta and IUCEE Executive Director Krishna Vedula planned the pilot workshop last year targeting faculty at the India universities. Mehta says faculty from other countries will be invited to attend future workshops.