An entrepreneurial learning experience provides opportunities to develop important skills and competences. These are essential for both graduate entrepreneurs as well as entrepreneurial graduates entering employment. An HEI that values entrepreneurial learning commits to regular review, validation, the updating of course content and learning outcomes across all study programmes to improve the design and deployment of teaching and learning activities.
Entrepreneurship education activities can have various intended learning outcomes. It is important that these match the teaching strategy. For example, entrepreneurial development objectives require more ‘learning by doing’ activities and place-based learning than traditional academic programmes. Learning objectives, teaching methods and students’ learning outcomes will, therefore, need to be defined and codified in the higher education institution curriculum and subsequently recognised in the students’ records of achievement. A clear communication of these in the syllabus informs students about the course requirements and what they can expect to learn.
An evaluation of entrepreneurship learning outcomes should include a review of the teaching methods of entrepreneurship education activities and the impact generated. Practicing entrepreneurial activities, such as the creative organisation of new ventures and organisational renewal, requires and represents an action-orientated knowledge. This acumen is a fundamental requirement for crafting the entrepreneurial process. Business planning is a popular teaching method with students writing real or fictitious business plans and using gaming technology to see the implementation and impact of decisions throughout a business cycle. This approach has received increasing criticism both from entrepreneurship scholars and entrepreneurship educators as being too linear, too strategic-management-orientated and not conducive to promoting entrepreneurial competences and skills in terms of opportunity and creative ideation processes. Although business planning is an important detail of education for would-be entrepreneurs, it should not constitute the core of entrepreneurship education. It is important to learn why entrepreneurs are concerned about detailed action and associated interaction and how this process ends up in innovative venturing.
Entrepreneurship as an official part of an academic study programme/curriculum may require a new approach to the assessment of learning outcomes. A balance needs to be found between the practice of experiential learning, its practical relevance and the academic rigor of the study programme. For example, some years ago, Lund University in Sweden received extra ‘excellence funding’ from the Swedish government to further develop its master programme in entrepreneurship. The programme’s focus on providing excellent support for students to start-up ventures during their studies recently backfired in the national assessment by the Swedish Higher Education Authority. The programme let its students write business plans instead of regular master theses, however, according to obligatory programme learning outcomes decided by the Swedish higher education authorities, master theses need to make a theoretical contribution. This is rather difficult to achieve with a business plan, and the same programme that was previously identified as ‘excellent’ is now declared of ‘inadequate quality’.
