It is not often that a university turns to venture capitalism as a model for innovative instruction.

However, University of California-Los Angeles student Eitan Arom reports on such a program at his school that is a great model for other offerings.

For three academic quarters out of the year, Public Affairs 4317 is a normal classroom, part of the California Center for Population Research.

But for the past two summers, it has been transformed into something very different.

From July to September, the room was a forest of ergonomic chairs, Macbooks and whiteboards scrawled over with business strategies.

During that time, it was home to a group of 11 teams of young entrepreneurs readying a product for market as part of the Startup UCLA accelerator. The program provides students and recent alumni with mentor networks, office space and a $5,000 stipend per team.

In other words, the accelerator gives students an opportunity they wouldn’t normally get in a lecture or discussion: the chance to get their hands dirty and learn by sheer trial and error.

….One year after graduating from last year’s accelerator, [Michael] Jirout is working on his travel application, Ship Mate, from an accelerator called Amplify, which is housed in a trendy, artfully decorated building located in an equally trendy neighborhood of Venice. He began working with Amplify shortly after last year’s capstone Startup UCLA event.

The application he started with his brother allows users to create itineraries and book excursions for cruises. When we spoke, it had been downloaded about 600,000 times and boasted more than 10,000 daily users, he said.

In some sense, Jirout’s success as an entrepreneur can be linked to UCLA’s success as an educational institution. And more programs like Startup UCLA could mean more Michael Jirouts.

In short, the skills needed for a complex task like starting a business are very hard to teach in a traditional classroom setting.

“I’ve heard it said you can’t really know how to do something until you do it,” said Michael Stange, a fourth-year aerospace engineering student whose Startup UCLA project was an application that helps users budget their free time.

The campus can take a lesson from Startup UCLA: for many students, learning by doing is the only way.