The importance of teaching engineering students innovation development is commonly clearly understood. It is essential to achieve products which are attractive and profitable in the market. To achieve this, an institute of engineering education has to provide students with needed knowledge, skills and attitudes including both technical and business orientation. This is important especially for SME’s. Traditionally, education of engineering provides students with basic understanding how to solve common technical problems. However companies need wider view to achieve new products. Universities of applied Sciences in Oulu and Eindhoven want to research what is the today’s educational situation for this aim, to find criteria to improve the content of the educational system, and to improve the educational system. Important stakeholders are teachers and students within the institute but also key-persons in companies. The research is realized by questionnaires and interviews from which a current situation can be found. The research will also include the opinion of management who give possibilities to change the curriculum. By this research more insight will be presented about how to re-design a current curriculum. The research will act as basis for this discussion in SEFI-conference about formulating a curriculum that includes elements for wide-ranging knowledge and skills to achieve innovations especially in SME’s.
This thesis presents an exploration of ‘how entrepreneurship education pedagogy can enhance undergraduate business students’ autonomous motivation for self-directed learning’. It has twin, equally valuable, purposes: to make an original theoretical contribution and to improve professional practice in this area. The work addresses the lack of pedagogical research in entrepreneurship education that focuses on learner development, with a specific aim at development of self-directed learning skills for lifelong learning. The research is approached with a concurrent, mixed methods design, comparing pre- and a post-EE, self-assessment survey results from 245 students, enrolled in a Young Enterprise venture creation programme, and a control group at a Dutch university. With the use of open-question surveys among the same population, during and after the EE modules, as well as from focus group discussions with a selection of participating students and teachers, explanation was sought for the observations drawn from the quantitative study. Significant relationships were found between students’ self-reported maturity of autonomy, self-efficacy, and motivation for learning, and in how these relate to self-directed learning readiness. Entrepreneurship education was found to significantly moderate the relationship between the learning characteristics and self-directed learning, and to strengthen of the students’ perceived readiness for self-directed learning. Explanation for the impact of EE were found to be related to the stage-wise, mixed pedagogy approach to learning, that combines authentic learning with a hierarchical approach to competence development, and supportive team dynamics. The research contributes to practice with a proposed conceptual framework for understanding how to prepare for self-directed learning readiness and a teaching-learning framework for its development in formal educational settings. It contributes to knowledge with its deeper understanding of how students experience learning in EE and how that affects their willingness to pursue learning opportunities.
MULTIFILE
The CDIO network works with the extended CDIO syllabus version 2.0 (Crawley et. al., 2011), in which two learning goal sections were added: leadership and entrepreneurship. This paper focuses on entrepreneurship and uses a case study of the Eye on Entrepreneurs (EoE) initiative in the Netherlands to reflect on the similarities and differences between the CDIO learning goals in entrepreneurship and the unconventional approach of EoE in teaching (engineering) students entrepreneurship in practice. Eye on Entrepreneurs (EoE) offers a student an intense learning experience in an informal but authentic learning context. What are the perceived strengths of their approach when it comes to effectively teaching entrepreneurship? When translating this back to the formal learning context of a university, how does this relate to the CDIO framework and syllabus especially? And what would this mean for the lecturer's competencies? Based on a case study discussion with practitioners an answer to these questions was sought. Both stakeholders from the (entrepreneurial) professional field (including talented students) and (entrepreneurship-) educators in general and from the CDIO-network were involved. The results show that what translates back to formal education is for teachers to be open minded, give space to manoeuvre and make mistakes, and have reciprocal dialogue and reflection with students when teaching entrepreneurship. Their main role should be to recognize talents and stimulate them to take initiative, show empathy and take risks in creativity. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannececiliabrink/
