| dc.description.abstract | Entrepreneurship is an important factor for economic development of the country and for this reason during the last decades the governments around the world have been actively promoting educational courses that can teach students entrepreneurial skills and help them become entrepreneurs. Thus, universities have understood the value of entrepreneurial education and started to attempt to promote students’ personal development through different entrepreneurial education programs (Li and Wu, 2019). Entrepreneurial education consists of both entrepreneurship education and enterprise education definitions. The term “entrepreneurship education” is based on the narrow view on entrepreneurship and has a goal to make students entrepreneurs while “enterprise education” term is based on a wide view of entrepreneurship and has a goal to teach participants entrepreneurial skills.
It was proved that entrepreneurial education based on experiential learning methods can teach students objectives of both enterprise and entrepreneurship education. Nevertheless, despite these benefits, there is a lack of research that concentrates on revealing the mechanisms of how and why entrepreneurial education works in increasing entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial skills of the students (Li and Wu, 2019).
Thus, the purpose of this master thesis is to evaluate the effectiveness of an entrepreneurial education course in terms of both enterprise education and entrepreneurship education dimensions with regards to the specific components of the course such as teamwork, business plan development, pitching and mentorship. The effectiveness of the course is evaluated by assessing the indicators relevant to entrepreneurship education and enterprise education. For the former the author used as indicators of success the course learning objectives and curricula content (the separate course components were not included here because the learning objectives and learnings were planned to be achieved by employing them); for the latter entrepreneurial intentions of the students were used as an indicator for the analysis. In addition, the author focused on revealing the course components that influence changes in students’ entrepreneurial intentions.
The author used qualitative and quantitative analysis to answer the research questions. For qualitative phase of the analysis the author employed in-depth interview content analysis, and for the quantitative phase ordinal logistic regression models were built for each course component.
Key findings include that experience based learning in entrepreneurship education is effective at both teaching the students entrepreneurial skills and increasing the entrepreneurial intentions of the course participants. | |