Abstract:

Entrepreneurial education (EE) can be a decisive factor in professional career achievements for students in engineering or other technical domains. It can provide them with the necessary knowledge to understand the whole process of developing a business, from identifying the opportunity to evaluating its connection with the market, and from designing the concept and manufacturing of a product to marketing it profitably. From this perspective, the development of entrepreneurial culture must be taken into account when shaping these students’ learning trajectories.

In this context, our attempt was to develop effective educational content on entrepreneurship for a wider audience, such as engineering students or adults enrolled in technical fields' continuing education.

As a first step, we surveyed a number of employers about the competencies linked to entrepreneurship they expect to be developed in tertiary education. Engineering students were also surveyed about their preferences on the delivery of the pedagogical materials on entrepreneurship. Based on the responses to these surveys and on our previous researches, we established the main goal of a new educational project: enhance the entrepreneurial skills of engineering students by providing them an extensive collection of digital-learning tools. In particular, the project will aim to make students practice the method of business model development and to make them familiar with the concepts of business innovation and green business.

An important element of a business launch is the business model (BM), which can play the role of pre-requisite for successful enterprises. The EE platform we designed and implemented will supports users in their learning on how to organize, articulate and implement business ideas using the Business Model Canvas (BMC) approach, - which is a graphical framework allowing them to describe own business model.

In order to better convey the knowledge about developing a BM, the instructional content on the EE platform was sequenced and reshaped to permit both digital micro-learning and mastery learning.

Digital Micro-learning is based on dividing of the educational material into small learning pieces, and mastery learning involves short assessment exercises performed prior and after each learning piece or lesson. Following this vision, the EE platform includes learning elements in various digital formats, as well as a business simulation tool and an interactive BMC.

A pilot test of the e-learning platform's usability and educational impact was currently performed with engineering students and adults enrolled in a continuing education program on computing. They gave us their feedback through several surveys and the results, – rather encouraging, will be further presented in this article.

The next logical step from presenting a Business Model is to visualize and evaluate the innovative and green features of it, i.e to introduce the concepts of Business Innovation (BI) and Green Business (GB).

Consequently, the next phase in our project will be to implement within the EE platform learning tools related to these subjects. These new e-learning tools will implement gamification as a pedagogical method to support users in integrating the knowledge and practicing the skills previously acquired through digital micro-learning.

The lessons learned through the development of this part of our project will further guide us in improving it.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship education, e-learning experiences.