When Students Design
Their Own Learning

"Rural and first-generation students can feel alienated from the very subject that’s meant to empower them."

In a nutshell

A six-year experiment in a rural U.S. college shows how entrepreneurship education can be reimagined when students help design their own learning.

In a Bigger Nutshell

Entrepreneurship education has often revolved around big-city success stories – start-up hubs, investors, and the endless talk of growth and scaling. Yet many students, particularly those in rural or economically distressed regions, don’t live inside that system. For them, traditional entrepreneurship education can feel like studying a world that isn’t theirs.

This urban bias isn’t just geographical – it shapes the content and tone of entrepreneurship education itself, privileging high-growth ventures over the slower, community-rooted forms of entrepreneurship that often sustain rural economies. As a result, rural and first-generation students can feel alienated from the very subject that’s meant to empower them.

Shankar Naskar’s 2025 study tackles this head-on. Over six years, he redesigned a small business course at a liberal-arts college in one of the poorest rural areas of the United States. His experiment, called “student co-created mastery experiences”, turned students from course participants into co-designers of their own learning. Instead of standardised assignments, each cohort built a portfolio of mastery experiences – authentic, locally grounded projects they negotiated with the instructor and local mentors.

In practice, co-creation meant that students helped decide what counted as meaningful evidence of learning. Instead of being handed a syllabus carved in stone, they negotiated project ideas, deliverables, and even assessment criteria – a process that turned evaluation into reflection rather than inspection.

One student team might work with a chamber of commerce on small-business consulting; another might design a crowdfunding campaign or analyse a county’s climate-change business opportunities. Each project had clear deliverables and learning outcomes but was shaped by student interests and community relevance. The instructor acted as facilitator, helping students connect to mentors and balance ambition with feasibility.

Publication Date: July 2025

Authors: Shankar T. Naskar

Institution: University of Virginia’s College at Wise, USA

Study Type: Multi-year case study (2018–2024)

Sample Size: Six cohorts (~16 students per year)

Research Focus: Designing and assessing “student co-created mastery experiences” for first-generation rural students in entrepreneurship education

Research Methodology: Longitudinal case study using qualitative student feedback, teaching evaluations, and course data; grounded in Experiential Learning, Action Learning, and Backward Design theories

Main Findings: Co-created mastery experiences improved student engagement, self-efficacy, and perceived learning outcomes over six years. Students valued flexibility, reflection, and real-world collaboration over standardised testing. The approach provides a viable, context-sensitive alternative to urban-centric entrepreneurship education models.

Citation: Naskar, S. T. (2025). Introducing student co-created mastery experiences: Actionable insights from a multi-year study of an entrepreneurial small business course in rural USA. Entrepreneurship Education, 8, 321–346. Link

Across six years from 2018 to 2024, students grew more engaged, more confident, and more satisfied with what they learned. Evaluations reflected this clearly, with ratings climbing from about 70 to nearly 90 percent throughout the period, even holding steady through the pandemic years.

The genius of this model lies in how it blends three pedagogical traditions: Experiential Learning (learning through doing and reflection), Action Learning (collaborating on real-world problems), and Backward Design (aligning activities tightly to intended outcomes). Together they form a practical blueprint for co-created, context-sensitive entrepreneurship education.

Of course, this is still a single case – a small course, a dedicated instructor, and a particular kind of community. Scaling such a model requires support, time, and institutional flexibility. But the principle is a powerful guideline: students learn best when they have a say in what “mastery” looks like. For educators in any setting – from big-city universities to online classrooms – this approach offers a reminder that entrepreneurship education doesn’t need to reproduce the same urban templates. It can be rebuilt, locally and collaboratively, to meet learners where they are.

The deeper insight, though, isn’t limited to rural education. Wherever students feel detached from entrepreneurship – whether because of culture, discipline, or circumstance – co-created mastery experiences can make it feel closer and more relevant. Sometimes the most effective teaching innovation isn’t a new tool, but letting students help design the journey.