Massive Online Course on Entrepreneurship. Case Study
Manuela Petrescu, Tudor Dan Mihoc
TL;DR
The paper investigates gender-based perceptions of entrepreneurial intentions after participating in a massive online course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship, involving $970$ students. It uses a multi-speaker online format with a CS moderator and end-of-course anonymous surveys to assess feasibility of online entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurial intent, and gendered views of the business environment. It reports that students across gender and faculties favor interactive online lectures and that enrollment motives cluster around curiosity and the desire to start a business, with only modest gender differences. It concludes that scalable online, interactive delivery is feasible and recommends future work on understanding perception shifts and optimizing modality and speaker design.
Abstract
Entrepreneurship is a key component of society, and universities and major political structures have tried to support its development in recent years. The present study aims to check the perception of students (based on gender) about entrepreneurial intentions after participating in a course that had a large number of undergraduate students. There were 970 students enrolled from different faculties with various specializations. We conducted a gender-based survey on the unconventional entrepreneurial fundamentals course, where each course was delivered by a different speaker. We also compared the responses provided by computer science students with the overall responses to find differences in their perceptions related to the feasibility of teaching entrepreneurship online, determining the entrepreneurial intention of the students taking this course, and analyzing the perceptions related to the business environment and the ease of starting a business. We found that students, regardless of gender or field of study, prefer interactive online presentations based on the manner in which lectures on this subject were conducted.