Or should I call that just teachers? I don’t know, sorry. My official title at the University of Oregon is “adjunct instructor,” I guess because I’ve only been teaching the one course — the one you are now looking at — and only once a year for the last eight years, twice a year for the three years before that. It was called “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” when it started, and then renamed to “Start Your Business.”

But more about that later, first, for other people wanting to use what I’ve done here to help with teaching a similar course, the question is: what’s in this for you, and how can you use it? So here is the answer, in steps.

1. This site is implemented in Wordpress, which is a free blogging platform.
2. What I’m offering to you is not a product, not for sale, and not productized; it’s a head start, a completed site that you can use, if you want, to create your own. It’s as if I gave you the Word document and you modify it.
3. I’m not selling it, I’m giving it to you, so for obvious reasons I’m not supporting it either.
4. Wordpress, however, has huge resources for support, and offers you for free a Wordpress blog site that you can use with this source material as your starting point. The information on that is at www.wordpress.com. I don’t sell it, I don’t get a commission, I just like and recommend it because it’s free, and relatively easy.
5. So the first step for you is to go to www.wordpress.com and register a domain name (like yourname.wordpress.com) and start a wordpress blog. That’s free, and well documented on the site.
6. Your next step is to get my exported file from this site, and import it into yours. I’m able to export the entire site into a wordpress-compatible file that you can get from me and then import into your own Wordpress site.  So you can click here and use the specific facilities of whatever browser you use (for example, right click and use “Save link as” in Firefox, or use “save target as” in Internet Explorer) to get the exported file (file name “ba410.wordpress.2009-06-09.xml”) that you will import into your own site. Keep track of where you save it onto your disk, because in the next step you’ll want to find it.
7. Go back to your Wordpress blog admin pages, and use the Import command in the Tools menu. It will bring up a dialog asking you to specify first what kind of source file (choose Wordpress), then second, which file from your computer to upload. You’ll find the file you downloaded onto your computer in step 6, and Wordpress does the rest.
8. After that, you can have a relatively easy job of editing it and making it your own. You will have complete control of everything on it, so you can:
   • Change the banner. Use the Wordpress interface for that, and the help and instructions they provide.
   • Change the assignments, syllabus, instructions, requirements, or any other part of the site, whatever you want, using the Wordpress editing interface, which I find relatively easy and intuitive to use.

I am working on developing more curriculum including many more professor notes, downloadable slides, exercises, and so on. That will be completed next September and released in Orlando at the annual convention of the Association of Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC. In the meantime, however, if this is useful to you,.