Massive Online Course on Entrepreneurship. Case Study

TL;DR

This study evaluates how a large online entrepreneurship course influences students' perceptions and intentions, highlighting gender and field differences, and emphasizing the preference for interactive online learning methods.

Contribution

It provides insights into student perceptions of online entrepreneurship education across genders and disciplines, based on a large-scale case study.

Findings

Students prefer interactive online lectures.

No significant gender difference in entrepreneurial intentions.

Computer science students' perceptions differ from overall responses.

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.