Abstract:

The paper reports on an innovative new Enterprise module at the University of Hertfordshire that is mandatory for all second year business school students – a cohort of over 1,100 students. The paper firstly discusses issues and problems associated with increasing class sizes in Higher Education and the impact on the student experience. It then provides an illustrative case study of a specifically large module in a subject area that requires a high degree of experiential learning and supervision – Entrepreneurship. The unique challenges and opportunities associated with the module are discussed, as well as learning with regards to logistics and content delivery, including an assessment of how technology can be used to scale the teaching experience. The paper concludes with a discussion of entrepreneurship education in the wider context of an increasing employability agenda: Is the attempt to make entrepreneurship mainstream and produce entrepreneurial graduates en masse a sign of capitalism in terminal decline as forecast by Schumpeter, or a liberating, self-empowering triumph of materialistic and spiritual individualism.

Keywords:

Enterprise, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, class size, mass education, schumpeter.