Education on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) has increased in the last two decades, specially, through MOOCs. Lately, these reusable online alternatives have tended to be revalorized by HEIs into blended learning activities, posing new challenges for instructors, specially, on how to bridge prior knowledge with in-class activities. Adopting a discursive approach to knowledge, our proposal aims to meet this challenge by identifying student’s ‘representations’, i.e., patterned constructions on disciplinary knowledge. Representations can be found across different cohorts and thus further complemented by instructors. To test this assumption and build our proposal, we analysed student’s representations in two observations. We mapped students’ representations over key I&E definitions (e.g., ‘start-up’) and, to know how prior knowledge may be complemented by instructors, we identified students’ alignment with expert disciplinary knowledge. Firstly, we found that the two cohorts tended to express representations by turning attention to several dimensions, e.g., referring to different types of features or finalities associated with concepts. Secondly, the disciplinary alignment description revealed that students tended to focus on the same components present in experts’ definitions, but with a greater level of generality. Our results have been packaged into a proposal that aims to help instructors scale their blended activities.

Link: https://www.abacademies.org/articles/increasing-value-in-a-semi-presential-module-a-representationbased-proposal-to-scale-up-blended-learning-on-innovation-and-entrepr-14917.html

In 2020, the early Covid-19 lockdown and social distancing induced the abrupt migration of traditionally presential learning activities to online domains. This “new normal” environment affected management not only of training courses, but also educational events whose main added value consisted in providing students with an interactive experience onsite, as it is the case of inter-institutional summer schools. The following research corresponds to a case study in which our organization, a French university, had to reformulate, in less than three months, one of its traditional summer schools while trying to keep the original goals. We aimed at identifying the impact of four managerial decisions by analyzing, through qualitative and quantitative surveys, students’ perception of gained or lost value regarding four topics: a) online teaching, b) pre-recorded busines cases providers, c) online social events, and d) technical solutions. With an emphasis in both didactics (i.e., knowledge) and pedagogics (i.e., learning experience), the analysis of perceived value allowed as to learn about students’ assessment position, which revealed two main issues at stake: belonging, in relation to students’ identity and academic background, and performing, related to students’ expectations.

Preprint link: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202111.0292/v1