April 28, 2020
By Nora Peterson and Julia McInnis
A week before New York City shut down due to COVID-19, our team at Halo kicked off our fourth cohort. Our first week of programming with the group of early stage women entrepreneurs was similar to our previous cohorts -- we had our first meeting in our Manhattan office space and celebrated afterwards with a lively dinner adorned with delicious wine. By the following week, most of the city was working from home, flights inbound from Europe were being halted, and it was no longer safe nor appropriate to meet others in public.
We had to pivot very quickly, as in that same week, to an entirely new model of virtual only sessions (it helped that 50% of our meetings were already over Zoom). However this meant, we no longer could build rapport and networks in person, a seemingly important detail when building startups and raising money.
While all of these changes with Halo were underway, we were also beginning to teach an accelerator course with NYU’s Sports Management program. With universities moving to virtual, we once again quickly converted our programming to virtual lectures for a group of students we had just started getting to know.
We were worried that our remote university classes would make it difficult to truly connect and understand the needs of each student. While there were moments when doing a 2-hour lecture over Zoom felt like we were talking to ourselves, we got into a groove where the students began to feel comfortable “interrupting” with questions, and we designed our lectures to have more deliberate pauses for questions as well as breaks to check in with the group.
CHALLENGES OF MOVING AN ACCELERATOR PROGRAM VIRTUAL
As we’re sure educators around the country can attest to, virtual learning comes with many challenges. Here are a few we struggle with:
1. Networking attracts founders to accelerators
One of the biggest expectations that people have when they join an accelerator is that it will be an in-person experience that is network-driven. There’s a reason why YCombinator requires its startups to move to SF for the duration of their program. Because we weren’t able to set up in person meetings for our founders, we quickly shifted our program format to include more guest speakers than in previous sessions. The increase in speakers meant that the cohort could network with those folks as well as each other, while connecting to our speakers’ referrals and recommendations.
2. Holding attention virtually sometimes felt virtually impossible
Even when participants have their videos on, we know that we don’t always have their attention the way that we do during the in person sessions. Some of the background distractions -- family, roommates, sirens -- can’t be avoided, but we were pushed to think about how to best keep everyone focused on the conversation. Calling on participants for a comment helped, as did making sure we tailored the content to the businesses at hand.
3. No serendipity
The formal nature of Zoom calls makes it hard for the types of casual, candid exchanges that often were useful for our cohort companies. In previous cohorts, someone might casually mention a friend with a graphic design background, and suddenly a couple founders would share that they were actually looking for a designer to help them with their branding. We’ve had to be more intentional in creating these moments and having more formal processes to facilitate information exchange.
HOW TO FOSTER COMMUNITY AMONG EARLY STAGE ENTREPRENEURS AND HOLD THE ATTENTION OF UNDERGRADS
Both our Halo cohort and our NYU class revealed some surprising discoveries about remote learning:
1. Founders work hard no matter what
The first is that engagement with the workshops and our speakers was as strong as it had been before. To assume that our founders might be less invested because we weren't meeting in person was a mistake: startup founders are committed and scrappy, and when they want to do something, they will dedicate themselves to making it happen.
2. Introverted people are more comfortable in virtual conversations
We were also able to let our founders' personalities come through during the remote meetings. The introverts or quieter people in person felt on a more ‘even playing field’ when everyone was remote and presumably felt more comfortable asking questions and sharing via video calls.
3. Universities haven’t perfected online curriculum
Universities may have prepared their students with the technology for remote classes, but they haven’t nailed down the etiquette for those sessions. We struggled with students keeping their videos off, which made it difficult to gauge if they were connecting with the material. Students should be prepped in how to use remote for communication and engagement, not just how to activate the technology.
THE LONG TERM IMPACT ON LEARNING AS A RESULT OF COVID-19
It’s undeniable that there will be major shifts in education as well as learning following this pandemic. As a society, we are already struggling with shortened attention spans from the constant distractions and dopamine hits our mobile phone alerts provide us with. Now the accountability and adherence to some social norms from in-person learning and events are further stripping away our ability to be present, read people’s body language, and converse in a dynamic manner.
It takes only 21 days to form a habit, and we are now more than 30 days into a national lockdown. There will be permanent changes moving forward; how people socially interact with each other, do their work and learn will all be different.
Below are a few ways universities and other education institutions can design safeguards to develop their students and foster an engaging learning experience:
1. Don’t be afraid to try new methods of teaching
Try different types of teaching methods to see the reaction and gather feedback. For example, a one hour full lecture may not work so well, but having more stopping points for Q&A and comments makes it easier for participants to reflect and engage during the lecture.
2. Don’t fight the technology, learn to work with it
Integrate more presentations by students using video to continue to develop their social and presentation skills. There is so much feedback that students can receive from presenting virtually. Much of this feedback will help prepare them for future in-person presentations, but the feedback will also make them stronger speakers during conference calls and work-related video conversations.
3. Recognize when students need an extra push
Require participation in “office hours.” Though this was something we offered, very few students took us up on it. It’s not necessarily their fault -- they may not have known what challenges they were about to face with the material -- but having a required one on one zoom call would have allowed for a casual conversation that would raise those topics and allow us to get to know each student and his/her needs better.