Abstract:

In 2013 the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology received funding to develop a blended learning entrepreneurship elective with the aim of enhancing students’ entrepreneurial mindset; turning business ideas into actions. All facilitated through Blended Learning in an attempt to support individual and flexible learning and to experiment with scaling of an entrepreneurship course.

In this paper we will discus how entrepreneurship teaching in blended learning format requires a change in educators’ focus, engagement and roles. This change is needed in order to frame a learning environment that enables students achieving the highly coveted sense of agency and for them to obtain the benefit of blended learning opportunities, e.g. enhanced networked learning and digital literacy.

The elective is developed through action research, and tested in two formats; an extra curricular (small scale) and an elective integrated in an existing bachelor’s degree (large scale). Educators where involved in the design process, delivery and evaluation. The students contributed to the evaluation and redesign through questionnaires and interviews.
Through this methodology we were able to engage and draw from the educators’ experience and knowledge and to design the structure to be relevant for the teaching practice of practice orientated, problem based and experiential learning.

The entrepreneurial mindset is addressed theoretically via The Business Model Generation (Osterwalder and Pigneur). The elective entailed an explorative process oriented learning design, which secured students attention to and interaction with the business model elements, mixed with practical independent exercises and supported/collaborative online activities.

The students all finished on expected or above expected level, and the majority express that they achieved learning from the course.
The flexibility and freedom of the blended learning elective seemed to attract the students and induce a more independent and more mature working process then usual, albeit the students were reluctant to take responsibility solving technical problems, e.g. to seek information when available online and to navigate between platforms. F2F activities were highlighted as more comfortable and secure, as they did not feel comfortable with what they described as distance to the educator.

This points to the importance of creating presence online. The pertinent learning, which we will discuss in our paper, is the importance of presence. It is thus our argument that the importance of stages and roles (Goffman) has to be addressed more when it comes to designing online courses. Our findings indicate that the success of the learning design is dependent on the educator recognizing students’ presence.
To accomplish the sense of being there together Schroeder argue that online co-presence should be governed, in terms of appearance, availability, maintaining awareness of others and by keeping the flow of interactions.

We suggest meeting this challenges with transformed learning designs that focuses on;
>Explicit and defined roles, assignments and purpose for all participants to withhold attention/engagement.

>Working with learning activities as modules, enabling educators to shift between activities in a way we could call Plan B learning design. Making the teaching situation less vulnerable to technical brake downs and to students’ need for technical support and differences in their abilities.

Keywords:

Blended Learning, Entrepreneurship, presence, practice, Action Reseach.