+Acumen Presents: Seth Godin's Leadership Workshop is a bestselling course on Udemy that has enrolled over 5,000 paying students.  

In this interactive online workshop, Seth Godin will walk you through the steps to make the choice to lead. You’ll learn to distinguish between leaders and managers, paint a picture of where you want your leadership journey to go, and motivate people to join you in your cause. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll learn that you can lead even when you don’t have formal authority.

Talent: Seth Godin

Instructional Designer and Course Builder: Amy Ahearn

+Acumen Presents: Chris Anderson on Public Speaking is a Udemy course that has enrolled nearly 10,000 students from around the world.

A carefully crafted talk can be the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, spreading knowledge, and promoting a shared dream.  As the Head of TED, Chris Anderson knows this firsthand.  He’s had a ringside seat listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers including people like Sir Ken Robinson, Amy Cuddy, Bill Gates, Elizabeth Gilbert, Salman Khan, Amanda Palmer, and Monica Lewinsky whose talks have been viewed millions of times. He’s learned that a talk done right can electrify a room and transform an audience’s worldview.

In this course, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to use public speaking to share powerful ideas.  Chris will walk you through real life examples of TED Talks that worked and also share firsthand stories of mistakes to avoid.  You’ll get a series of worksheets and exercises to plan your own talk that draw from Chris’ latest book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.  Whether you are an entrepreneur pitching a company, a nonprofit professional making a fundraising request, or teacher looking to captivate your students, this course will help you become a powerful public speaker capable of leaving a lasting impression.  After completing this course, you’ll be ready to structure your own talk and deliver it memorably to an audience.  

Talent: Chris Anderson, Head of TED

Instructional Designer/Course Builder: Amy Ahearn

In this 4 week introductory course from +Acumen, we’ll cover what social entrepreneurship is and why it’s so exciting.  Built from Acumen’s years of experience investing in social entrepreneurs, this course will also feature firsthand stories and advice from 4 inspiring founders: Charles Best of DonorsChoose.org, Thulsiraj Ravilla of Aravind Eyecare, Leila Janah of Sama Group, and JB Schramm of College Summit. Designed for anyone approaching social entrepreneurship for the first time, this interactive learning experience will give you an overview of the sector.  It will help you explore pathways for initial engagement with social enterprises and uncover your relevant passions and skills.  By the end of this course, you’ll have found a concrete way to contribute to a social enterprise OR you’ll be engaged in early stage ideation for your own venture.  Specifically, you’ll begin to identify a problem you care about, understand the considerations needed for impact and financial sustainability, and learn about how various entrepreneurs have thought about scale.

Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design is a seven-week curriculum that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and how this approach can be used to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change. This course was been created to reach those who are brand new to human-centered design.

JobTrain is committed to helping those who are most in need to succeed. Their purpose is to improve the lives of people in the East Palo Alto community through assessment, attitude and job skills training, and high potential career placement.

Each of JobTrain’s programs combines vocational training, academics, and essential skills development, preparing students to turn their lives around—from unemployment and poverty to success and self-sufficiency.   This project involved migrating a 10 week in-person training program into an online and blended learning format.

IPPF works in 170 countries to empower the most vulnerable women, men and young people to access life-saving services and programs, and to live with dignity.

This online training program and in-person workshop provided IPPF member associations with a comprehensive introduction to social enterprise models to enable them to find new sources of earned income to supplement non-profit activities.

Striving to create enduring change in our complex, dynamic world can feel daunting — and sometimes downright impossible. With so many interconnected forces at play, it’s easy to get discouraged by detours, false assumptions, roadblocks, and dead ends.

A systems practice is a way to make sense of complex environments and uncover the dynamics that have the greatest potential for impact. This course will lead you through each step of understanding a system, analyzing it to find points of leverage, and learning how to adapt in a changing environment. You will also gain access to a portfolio of step-by-step tools, processes, and mindsets to apply to your current and future work.

This course is ideal for professionals working on complex problems across any field of social impact. A systems practice journey has the potential to transform the way you work, think, and view the world and can get you closer to your goal of creating sustained positive impact.

Lean Startup Principles for Social Impact is a 4-week course inspired by the Lean Launchpad Class pioneered by Steve Blank. In this course you will learn how to test, validate, and adapt your vision of change to ensure you’re creating the greatest impact and investing your time in something that truly meets the needs of your customers and stakeholders.  This course is appropriate for anyone who wants to try out lean methodologies to start a new enterprise or building a new program or initiative within an existing organization. The lean approach relies on validated learning, experimentation, and iterative product releases to shorten product development cycles, measure progress, and gain valuable customer feedback. In an environment where the majority of startups fail, lean principles aim to give startups a better chance of success by helping entrepreneurs learn more quickly what works and discard what doesn’t. This course draws on the latest thinking in Silicon Valley, but adapts it for the social sector.  We’ll showcase examples of social enterprises and organizations that have successfully run experiments, pivoted, and remained lean and innovative while ethically serving their customers and prioritizing social impact. These principles aren’t just for high tech startups but tools for any innovator, especially those determined to solve the world’s toughest social problems.

Medical Education in the New Millennium is a colloquium course that enrolled thousands of students around the world and was released on Stanford’s OpenEdX platform.  It ran for 11 weeks.

Patient Engagement Design is a course focused on bringing principles of design thinking and participatory engagement to medicine.  This course enrolled healthcare stakeholders from over 60 countries and ran for 10 weeks.  It featured facilitated discussion forums, Padlet brainstorming boards, segmented course videos, and structured reflection questions.

STARTprep is a year-long online micro-learning course designed to prepare anesthesia residents for competency in the anesthesia basic sciences. It is not a replacement for board preparation, but a complement to existing educational activities. 

We surveyed hundreds of current anesthesia residents across the country.  Their insights drive STARTprep’s design.

Time-shifted and place-shifted learning: STARTprep can be accessed anywhere in the world including on mobile devices.

High yield and focused: The STARTprep curriculum is based on the published basic science content outline. We focus on essential topical review to focus limited learning time on the most important subjects. Is it important basic science knowledge? Absolutely.

A 365 day curriculum: At STARTprep we believe in consistent incremental daily learning instead of cramming. Our online curriculum is spaced over the course of a year through daily learning assignments. Residents are reminded by email each day to complete their daily STARTprep lesson.

Learner-centered: Residents complete modules and question banks at their own pace and convenience.

Mobile-friendly: Specially designed to be mobile-responsive for today’s tablets and smartphones to power learning on-the-go.

3000 online questions: Authored by anesthesia faculty from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, University of Colorado Denver and other leading anesthesia programs around the country, STARTprep holds 3000 high quality online questions to test knowledge and focus learning.

A community of learners: By joining STARTprep your residents join an online community of anesthesia learners from around the country who share a common goal of achieving competency in the anesthesia basic science curriculum.