Abstract:

Market demands and limited work opportunities in Oman entail for widening prospects of teacher education programs to graduate teachers who can (1) teach entrepreneurially and (2) seek opportunities to develop enterprises when they need.

The program at Instructional and Learning Technologies (ILT) department is among very few in the world that graduate instructional technology specialists at the undergraduate level. With the Information Technology teachers, who graduate from the same department, these specialists are expected to work in schools. However, employment in schools is not guaranteed to many of them. Therefore, many graduates have started their own business or worked in different fields such as human resources, training departments, instructional design, e-content development in governmental agencies and private sector. Compared to graduates of other teacher education programs, graduates from the ILT department had succeeded in creating other opportunities for themselves.

Although the program does not state it directly in its mission and goals, content analysis of core courses syllabi, indicated that entrepreneurial elements and skills are practised in different courses and assignments. This paper reports the finding of the content analysis. It also reports the results of a questionnaire that explored faculty members’ awareness of entrepreneurship and a questionnaire that explored students’ beliefs and attitudes of entrepreneurial thinking and skills. It then provides some guidelines based on the findings that would promote more practice of entrepreneurship in teacher education programs.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship, Instructional Technology, teacher education.