Entrepreneurship 1 (BUS 3303) at UoPeople

Entrepreneurship 1 (BUS 3303) is another course I took last term at the UoPeople. I think it’s one of the most significant classes of your business degree at any school. This course helps you understand the challenges you might face in starting or owning a new business. It also equips you with the concepts and some tools necessary for starting a business, like a business plan, marketing plan, market research, tools to retain or attract customers, source of funding, price of your product, cost of production, planning, implementation, and so on.

My class had nearly 40 students, but not many dropped out. Unfair peer assessment was quite prevalent in this class, but I don’t know why. It could be because many first-year students were taking this class gathering from their introduction in the course forum. My professor was a British-Canadian and had a PH.D. He was probably the only professor so far in my experience at UoPeople that read all the discussion forum posts and accompanying references and then commented on every post. I would say that he was quite polite and intelligent. He mostly taught MBA classes at the UoPeople and was teaching this class on a Bachelor’s level for the first time. Funny story, he assumed that we were MBA students initially. But no one other than I corrected him.

There is a prescribed book for the course, but you only read one or two chapters from it. Everything else, you learn from online links which aren't very entertaining in my viewpoint. One of the links you repeatedly learn from is Wikibooks, which is as dull as ditchwater.

It's an extremely lightweight course, and you don’t have to write Written Assignments and Learning Journals consecutively. The Discussion Forum and Learning Journals are 10% each (20% in total). The Written Assignments are worth 20%. You have to write 4 Written Assignments, 3 of them in 3 weeks without a break. You have to write 7 Discussion Forum posts; the last one is non-Graded and about saying goodbyes to your classmates. Except for the first Discussion Forum post, all of them are very interesting. The Written Assignments are also very exciting with minimal word count required. Sometimes you write about a famous entrepreneur and their traits, and at others, you talk about creating entrepreneurial teams. 

In the Learning Journals, you have to do research on your own as the links provided by the school aren’t very helpful. In the later part of the course, you put everything together and submit your business plan along with other things to summarize everything you have learned in the course in one of the last Learning Journals.

The Graded Quizzes and the Final Exam are worth 60% in total (30% each). Each Graded Quiz is 15% each. You take the Graded Quizzes in the 4th and 7th weeks of the course. The questions are very straightforward and even are comprised of general knowledge questions at times, like, who is Muhammad Yunus? You have to answer 10 questions in 30 mins in the Graded Quizzes. The Final Exam had 35 questions, which you have to complete within 1 hr. If you know your material and do all the readings, you’ll do very well on the Final Exam.

35-40 questions instead of 60 questions in an hour with math is a far better deal. I just don’t understand why the UoPeople’s exams are so inconsistent. I nearly ended up getting an A+ and I couldn’t be happier with the effort I put into the class.