digital adoption in entrepreneurship education in the time
TRANSCRIPT
GM1361, Master Degree Project in Knowledge-based Entrepreneurship
Digital adoption in Entrepreneurship Education
in the time of Covid-19 - The impacts and
lessons to learn and apply for post-Covid-19.
A Mutiple Case Study ________________________________________________________________________________
Sophie Lam
Graduate School
Supervisor:
Ethan Gifford
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Abstract ________________________________________________________________________________
Digital adoption has already been a discussion topic among academia for years, but the
education industry was still reluctant to try embracing digital to deliver lectures or organize
classes, until the disruption caused by Covid-19; the pandemic has undeniably affected a lot of
fields, including Entrepreneurship education (EE). For the first time in the academy's history,
adopting digital solutions to transit to emergency remote teaching was set up. While
Entrepreneurship Education has its own differentiated nature of “theory - practical emphasis"
to equip students with knowledge, entrepreneurial skills to deal with ambiguities and to bring
ideas into practice; such a sudden transition is even more challenging with the field always
requiring dynamics and high attention in engaging with students interactively. With ‘OHWI’
framework, this research investigate if there is change in the Objective of educating
entrepreneurship due to Covid-19, capture How these process of digital adoption has been
implemented in entrepreneurship education during the time of pandemic, followed by
analysing What teaching methods and learning activities have newly adapted due to the
situation, and to assess Impacts brought by the Coronavirus, so as to condense lessons learnt
and potentially able to apply when the pandemic is over. With an explorative approach for this
multi case study, the author interviewed 11 teachers and 12 students in 6 universities in
Netherland, Sweden and Singapore. The findings indicate that more attention and assistance is
given to educators (in ‘how to teach’) than students (in ‘how to learn') with their unsolved
obstacles and unmet needs during their remote learning process. On the other hand, organizing
interacting, entrepreneurially engaging lectures are among key responsibilities of the teachers,
while diverse initiatives were applied by some of them, they are encountering additional
multitasking challenge. Moving forward, every stakeholder expects to go back to campus,
however hybrid mode is suggested to inherit legacy from the process of digital adoption in EE
during Covid-19, at the same time allowing more flexibility for both teachers and students.
Nevertheless, the decision maker should aware their insight driving the propose of new study
mode, to avoid potential risks and to achieve EE's expected quality.
Key words: Entrepreneurship education (EE); Cognitive Load Theory (CLT); ‘OHWI'
framework.
Abbreviation
Chalmers: Chalmers University of Technology.
CLT: Cognitive Load Theory.
EE: Entrepreneurship education.
GU: University of Gothenburg.
JU: Jönköping University,
MSc: Master of Science.
NUS: National University of Singapore.
UvA: University of Amsterdam
VU: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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Acknowledgement ________________________________________________________________________________
The author would like to express sincerest gratitude to all of interviewees, who are
Entrepreneurship educators and learners, for participating in this study, sharing the practical
insights and suggestions. Without your support, the author would not be able to complete this
research. In addition, the author would like to thank the program coordinator, Rick Middle for
feedback sessions that encourage the author a lot to determine in exploring this new topic.
Moreover, the author would like to thank the supervisor, Ethan Gifford for all advice and
coaching during the whole process from ideation, even before the semester officially starts until
the very end of the journey.
It has never been easy to write a thesis, especially a thesis in social distancing time, but all of
your encouragement is truly meaningful to mark my final completed work of this 2 year Master
program in Gothenburg University, in Sweden.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, June 6, 2021.
Sophie Lam
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 6
1.1. Background and motivation ............................................................................................ 6
1.2. Purpose and research questions ....................................................................................... 7
2. Literature review .............................................................................................................. 7
2.1. Entrepreneurship education: ................................................................................... 7 2.1.1. Definition and objectives: ...................................................................................................................................... 8 2.1.2. Nature of entrepreneurship education............................................................................................................ 8
2.2. How to deal with the change?................................................................................. 10 2.2.1. Cognitive load theory (CLT) and its implication on teaching and learning experience ......11 2.2.2. Experience from regular online education: ................................................................................................12
2.3. Impact on Entrepreneurship education ................................................................ 13
3. Research strategy ............................................................................................................ 15
3.1. Research method ..................................................................................................... 15
3.2. Research philosophy ............................................................................................... 15
3.3. Research design ....................................................................................................... 15
3.4. Data collections ........................................................................................................ 16 3.4.1. Interviews - the primary data of this research: ........................................................................................16 3.4.2. Sampling:.....................................................................................................................................................................16 3.4.3. Secondary data: ........................................................................................................................................................18
3.5. Research quality ...................................................................................................... 18
4. Empirical findings .......................................................................................................... 19
4.1. Objectives and key focus of the EE programs:..................................................... 19
4.2. How digital solutions have been adopted .............................................................. 24
4.3. What are Entrepreneurship programs' teaching methods and learning
activities that have been changed after adopting digital solutions? .............................. 30
4.4. Impact of digital adoption in EE ............................................................................ 38 4.4.1. Perspective of the teachers ..................................................................................................................................38 4.4.2. Impact of digital adoption in EE......................................................................................................................42
5. Analysis ........................................................................................................................... 47
5.1. More attention and assistance to teachers than students in digital transition -
adaptation and students’ unsolved obstacles in the learning process: .......................... 49
5.2. Unmet need of students in Entrepreneurship studying objectives, potentially
due to constructive misalignment. .................................................................................... 49
5.3. Stay interacting, engaging entrepreneurially regardless of teaching mode, and
challenges for the teachers. ................................................................................................ 51
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5.4. Strong intention and interest in hybrid mode of study for post Covid-19 but
driven by different insights................................................................................................ 53
5.5. Lesson in effective communication towards organization in unplanned change
transition and adaptation. ................................................................................................. 54
6. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 55
6.1. Summary of research questions ............................................................................. 55
6.2. Contributions ........................................................................................................... 58 6.2.1. Theoretical contributions ....................................................................................................................................58 6.2.2. Practical contributions: ........................................................................................................................................59
6.3. Recommendations for future research .................................................................. 62
6.4. Limitations of the study .......................................................................................... 62
References ............................................................................................................................... 63
Appendix ................................................................................................................................. 65
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1. Introduction
1.1. Background and motivation
“Education not only needs new ideas and inventions that shatter the performance expectations of
today’s status quo; to make a meaningful impact, these new solutions must also “scale,” that is grow
large enough, to serve millions of students and teachers or large portions of specific underserved
populations”. (Shelton, 2011)
Technology innovations in the 20th century have impacted almost all aspects of society, but
scholars have questioned whether its applications on higher education were not on par with the
steady development of the digital revolution (Wildavsky et al., 2011). Though the universities
are where “reformer and entrepreneurs operate” (Wildavsky et al., 2012), the lack of new ideas,
solutions at “scale” with great impact remains a desire but has not yet been able to accomplish
as mentioned above by Shelton (2011).
However, since early 2020, a novel coronavirus Covid-19 has spread rapidly, over the world
(World Health Organisation, 2020). It “disrupted global interaction with countries closing
borders and regions being shut down” (Alon et al., 2020). In the report “The Covid-19
pandemic: Shocks to education and policy” issued by the World Bank last year, the pandemic
was described as “largest simultaneous shock to all education systems in our lifetimes”. It was
recorded that by April 2020, the closure of schools (including all levels of studies) have
occurred in 180 countries, with 85% of students over the globe are out of schools due to
countries’ policies of lockdown and social distancing, to reduce the outbreak. Then people have
realized that the situation gets more severe, and the teachers have to try using various platforms
which allow them to continue educating the students.
According to Ratten (2020), “digital revolution" actually had already been a discussion topic
among academia for years, but the education industry was still reluctant to adopt or try
embracing digital to deliver lectures or organize classes, until the disruption caused by Covid-
19; the pandemic has undeniably affected a lot of fields, especially education, made digital
form of teaching and learning become compulsory response to the pandemic, regardless the
field of study. The replaced study modes since social distancing policies may include
asynchronous, hybrid, or totally online, depending on the severe situation which varied by the
policy in each region and decision of each education institute (Ratten, 2020). Such a large scale
of change has obviously stressed the academy system, as it is almost impossible to make all
faculty members suddenly become online teaching and learning experts (Iglesias-Pradas,
Santiago, et al., 2021).
Handling this sudden transition has already been a significant challenge to the whole academy
world, and according to Ratten (2020), managing this crisis is specifically “difficult for
entrepreneurship education” as “experiential learning”, equipping students with “practical
knowledge to act in an entrepreneurial manner" are perceived vital in EE (Ratten, 2020). What
have been the impacts of these “reactive” solutions in teaching and learning experience of EE?
Does it meet the expectation of universities compared to their expectation when implementing
these changes? What can be learned and “proactively” applied for universities, teachers and
students when the outbreak is ended and the institutes can re-open without restriction? These
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are the sources of inspiration and areas which the author wishes to explore in the scope of the
Master thesis.
1.2. Purpose and research questions
The author proposes the master thesis topic as follow:
“Digital adoption in Entrepreneurship Education in the time of Covid-19, the impacts and
lessons to learn and apply for post Covid-19.”
The purpose of this thesis is aim to investigate ‘what’ and ‘how’ the digital solutions have been
adopted in the time of Covid-19, and relevant results brought to the teachers and students in
Entrepreneurship education, to conduct analysis about the impacts on their experience of
teaching and learning during the pandemic, and to have initial suggestion to potential
innovation or change in Entrepreneurship higher education when the study environment
resumes to normal. Given most of the attention from Media for the impacts of Covid-19 has
been quite negative without investigating its potential positive influence on the significant
digital skills adoption of all stakeholders in education (Parnell et al., 2020), the author has the
assumption that this abnormal operation differed by each university during the pandemic may
lead to a variety of additional knowledge, capabilities development, which will be validated.
Furthermore, the author also has the ambition to harness opportunities of improvement and
innovation in teaching and learning entrepreneurship derived from this crisis, as a
recommendation for educators and learners in this field. Therefore, the research questions (RQ)
were formulated as follow:
RQ1: How have digital applications been adopted in Entrepreneurship Education during the
time of Covid-19?
RQ2: In what way do EE's purpose, method, experience and result of teaching and learning
entrepreneurship have been changed under impacts of the digital adoption due to Covid-19?
RQ3: What are the lessons to learn and apply after Covid-19, in the perspective of both
teachers, and students?
2. Literature review
This chapter provides overviews structured from relevant researches of scholars as a foundation
to investigate the proposed research topic. It will go through studies related to Entrepreneurship
education, its definitions, objectives, and impact measurements, together with research related
to cognitive learning theory implications on remote teaching to deal with the sudden change of
digital adoption in EE.
2.1. Entrepreneurship education:
Entrepreneurship education (EE) has been recognized as showing remarkable progress in the
quantity of good research relating to its development and circumstances (Solomon et al., 2002;
Pittaway and Cope, 2007). According to Henry et al. (2010), the growth of this field is driven
by the increasing support of different stakeholders, such as policymakers, academicians, and
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also students; because they have “combined shared interests'' in their perception of socio-
economic gain, either at the individual level or community state. However, it is still considered
as a “developing field of study” with various debates reflecting diverse interests and theoretical
perspectives even for the term of EE itself (Mwasalwiba, 2010).
2.1.1. Definition and objectives:
In the research of educating entrepreneurship, Sexton and Bowman (1984) emphasized that
scholars showed their attempt to investigate the field, however, without providing a
spontaneous way to define it. Mwasalwiba (2010) defined EE as a process of educating (or
training) to influence people's intentions, conduct, attitudes, or belief towards entrepreneurship
as a potential profession, or to increase their acknowledgment of its role in society.
Given the situation of lacking a consistent explanation about EE, it leads to various objectives
of this field at the same time. Notably, we are still able to cluster the objectives of EE, by
narrowing them down to what academicians (or, and learners) have the intention to gain, hence
determining the approach of pedagogy accordingly (Mwasalwiba, 2010). Researched by Alain
Fayolle (2013), EE should be developed and designed following four “educational principles":
(i) to gain an understanding of how various social interconnection work;
(ii) to learn navigating to gain an understanding of how various social interconnection work;
(iii) to learn navigating in a complicated and compelling environment;
(iv) to learn how to develop and modify knowledge, strategy and how to put ideas into action.
Fayolle (2007, 2013) highlighted that EE should equip people to deal with the world full of
uncertainties, to be a responsible change agent performing entrepreneurial thinking and action;
namely, the researchers clustered 3 categories of EE learning outcomes into: Learn ‘about’,
‘through’ (or ‘in') and ‘for' entrepreneurship: The first aim, “learn about entrepreneurship"
refer to the perspective of obtaining general knowledge about the field as a phenomenon, it
may also include developing sensitizations to diverse stakeholders such as general public,
finance professionals, policymakers on entrepreneurial impacts towards society; The second
direction, “educate through (or in) entrepreneurship” expect to shape students becoming a more
entrepreneurial individual in organizations by transferring knowledge into practice; and
“educate for entrepreneurship" is the most “desired outcome" of educators, as it is to “create
an entrepreneur" who decides to found a new venture, here the teachers expect to stimulate the
process of entrepreneurship, to offer necessary facilities to build a new venture.
2.1.2. Nature of entrepreneurship education
The definition and objectives of EE indicate the fundamental difference between its nature and
other business fields education. Namely, according to Gartner and Vesper (1994), EE seems to
have higher attention to the “hands - on practical aspects of business”, while other business
majors often deemphasized those aspects. The researchers emphasized the characteristics of
EE:
“The ability to “manage” or behave successfully in ambiguous situations may be
an important characteristic of entrepreneurial behavior. What may differentiate the
“basics” of entrepreneurship education from the “basics” of business education
may be the attention placed on equivocal situations, e.g., the development of new
products, new services, new markets, and new organizations. It is not the ability to
tolerate equivocality that is an important feature of entrepreneurship, but the ability
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to take equivocal situations and transform them into non-equivocal events that
appears to be the essence of entrepreneurship”. (Gartner and Vesper, 1994, p. 184).
Gartner and Vesper have described the nature of EE, the next question is how to develop
pedagogy paradigm accordingly? Fayolle (2007) suggested to develop pedagogy which is “for
students to acquire, through action, the entrepreneur’s knowledge, aptitudes, and perceptions.”
Particularly, on one side is “behaviouristic paradigm of education” with the main teaching form
of “knowledge transfer”; on the other side is “constructivist paradigm of education” in which
encourage students to interact, listen, exchange, experiment and observe the real entrepreneurs
(Fayolle, 2013). Why do EE need these both components? The key reason closely relates to the
nature of this field, according to a report “Council for Excellence in Management Learning”
from United Kingdom Institute in 2000, “theoretical training” only couldn't equip students
business skills of entrepreneurship, such as becoming a creative, risk taking entrepreneur. It
does not mean to ignore the critical role of theory, Fayolle articulated that though theory is
usually static, it benefits students since offering “useful theoretical framework” which is
foundation to build further knowledge; however, EE “must go beyond theory”, to better prepare
students for a pragmatic environment, which was categorized by Fayolle as “dynamic”
(practical) component in EE, alongside with “static’ (theoretical) component mentioned
previously. In short, researchers highlighted the need of “theory - practice emphasis” in EE.
For the “theory” part, it is suggested by Fayolle (2007) to teach the students tested
entrepreneurship models, methods, theories that are not standing still at academy interest but
more importantly, are able to apply to both educators and practitioners. To inject practical
elements, a typical way in an entrepreneurship classroom is to assign students with ‘live case’
assignments. Namely, each student group needs to prepare comprehensive research of a real
entrepreneurial company with deep-dive diagnostics, and problem-solving skills to evaluate
the company’s existing problems or issues in their strategy, then the groups will present their
own analysis, initiatives and recommendations to the firm. This kind of assignment and method
help to facilitate the learning process, grow their entrepreneurial capability. Like in manner,
Gibb (2002) stressed the process of EE is not staying between the educator and students only,
furthermore, it should be “deeply embedded in the stakeholder community in their regions, to
participate in joint ventures, incubator activities with other key stakeholders and indeed to
judge their own excellence through stakeholder eyes”.
To conduct an effective EE program for a long lasting learning experience, Fayolle (2007)
suggested to shift from ‘teaching’ perspective to ‘learning’ perspective and underlined the
importance of combing both deductive and inductive learning approaches: Let students to apply
knowledge from others to start nurturing their entrepreneurial behaviours and skills (deductive
learning), and encourage them to identify business issues in a real context on their own, then
establish goals, devise an action plan and evaluate the result (inductive learning). By these
holistic approaches and stimulations within the entrepreneurship curriculum, the students are
prepared for the rapid transformations and ambiguities, which are typical for entrepreneurs.
To summarize in brief mentioned research, EE is not just serving the purpose of teaching
students to become self-employed start-up founders (equivalent to learn ‘for’
entrepreneurship), furthermore, it equips the learners with broad knowledge of the field (learn
‘about'), and more importantly, trains them applying the theory into real situations to either
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demonstrate their entrepreneurship in a well-established company or new business (learn
‘through’ or ‘in'). In order to achieve these educational objectives, researchers accentuate the
nature, differentiation of teaching Entrepreneurship and its importance in “theory - practice
emphasis", demonstrated through both sides of educating forms: through ‘knowledge transfer'
form, also known as ‘theoretical component’; and through the form of interaction focus, also
known as ‘practical component’. These descriptions, especially “the need for practical and real
life examples" has underlined the challenge of EE during the time of Covid-19 and social
distancing (Ratten, 2020). As normally there are various integrating activities and interactions
during the theoretical courses or practical projects to deliver education objectives mentioned
above, however all of these regular set up was forced to stop or transfer to another form -
digitalization in such sudden circumstances.
2.2. How to deal with the change?
The researchers Iglesias-Pradas, Santiago, et al (2021) suggested naming this “unplanned
change" in education as “emergency remote teaching", notably, this new form of education is
different from “online learning" mode which has been implemented for years, as the
fundamental difference is that: The former's original educational objective and all courses
design are for on-campus set up and the digitalization is purely the response to the pandemic,
while the latter is clearly set at the beginning, and considered as “well planned online learning
experience", and such process of detail planning will almost be absent in most emergency
shifting case as Covid-19. Furthermore, for the latter form, usually, it takes 6 to 9 months for
developing and preparing a complete university’s online course offering an effective learning
experience (Iglesias-Pradas, Santiago, et al, 2021). These points are important to set a ground
understanding for the situation and to take into consideration when evaluating the effectiveness
of adopting digital solutions during the pandemic. However, it is still critical for “emergency
remote teaching" educators to inherit appropriate experience from the other to apply in this
sudden and rapid transition, especially on how to develop an “effective online education" for
the students (Iglesias-Pradas, Santiago, et al, 2021). In the same study, the researchers
emphasized that “learning" itself is a process including both social and cognitive aspects, not
solely “information transmission"; Namely, when reviewing on-campus education which aim
to support success of students, lecturing is only a instructional facet in the ecosystem of
“learning", it also includes the interactions in class, the resources in library, and other services
to assist students, such as career service, house renting service, health service and so on. It
means that for the students, when they need to study remotely due to social distancing, what
they missed is not just classroom lectures, but the whole ecosystem supposed to receive, now
becoming incomplete compared to normal setup. Furthermore, toward this type of “shift in
focus” to online learning tasks, the researchers who studied about the implication of Cognitive
Load Theory (CLT) for online learning noticed that the “cognitive load”, which is generated
by such digital studying tasks may be “too high for novices” hence hampering learning
capability (Van Merrienboer, Jeroen JG, and Paul Ayres, 2005).
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2.2.1. Cognitive load theory (CLT) and its implication on teaching and learning
experience
Merrienboer et al. (2005) summarized their learning from Sweller (2004) research that CLT
speculates “working memory" with extremely limited space in the brain when handling new
information, together with an unlimited “long term memory" effectively holding “cognitive
schemas", which differ by the level of automation and complexity".
Before a ‘novel information’(such as new lessons that the teacher delivered to students) really
becomes ‘knowledge' or ‘expertise' stored in human brain in long term, it will be firstly
processed in ‘working memory' (depending on the format of that information, it will be
categorized by the researchers into 3 types inside ‘working memory': intrinsic, extraneous and
germane cognitive load); then only if it successfully construct or automate ‘schema', the
expertise or knowledge is developed and stored in long term memory. The process is illustrated
in the figure below:
Figure 1: Illustration for cognitive load inside human brain (the author summarized from the
research)
The key concept of CLT course design for students is to avoid overload in limited capacity of
working memory, and to increase cognitive load that is directly relevant to the learning process,
to be able to construct ‘schema', “after which they may become automated if they are repeatedly
and successfully applied” (Merrienboer et al., 2005, p.11). Notably the capacity of working
memory is actually different by learners, especially between ‘novice learner' and learners who
already acquired more expertise at the beginning (Merrienboer et al., 2005), which is a popular
situation in a diverse profile classroom in business school with various admitted students who
come from different backgrounds, so how do we know until to what extent is “overloading",
or to how much extent of automation for long term memory in schema? There is no fixed
formula to deal with such diversity but keep developing ‘dynamic instructional methods to
adapt instruction to learners’ individual needs', suggested by Merrienboer et al. (2005). The
scope of this thesis actually doesn’t aim to deep dive in explaining building blocks of CLT in
details, but rather to review collective studies with clear implication on what are the potential
educational activities and design that are suggested to assist the process of establishing
knowledge in schema - ‘long term memory', or to make it more simple: the appropriate
researched recommendation fostering effective learning, especially in the context of online
study. Researchers Merrienboer et al. (2005) underlined several suggestions for digital teaching
set up as follow:
(i) In the beginning phases of shifting to digital mode, educators should simplify learning tasks
for students to avoid too high cognitive load for new learners hence hampering learning
experience as mentioned above. For instance, instead of providing various information sources,
teachers can offer an already integrated source of information, because the process of
combining those multiple information sources does not help to construct or to automate schema
Novel informationTemporarily stored in
“Working memory”
Become “long term memory”
stored in “cognitive schemas”
If successfully go
through process of
“schema construction”
or “schema
automation”
The transfer of New knowledge/ information in human brain
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to store information in long term memory, but does increase working memory load. Another
example, instead of giving a set of information needed to understand in a unimodal visual form
that consists “a written text and a diagram", educators should replace the text by “spoken form"
together with a visual, this is to help reducing cognitive load in working memory by transferring
part of visual load to auditory sub processor. In addition, the ‘sequencing methods' of arranging
study tasks from most simple to increasingly complex is also highly recommended in handling
‘high element interactivity materials', which is relevant to the high interaction nature of EE.
(ii) Motivation is an important dimension impacting on learning success: It is researched and
proven that these aspects are correlated positively together: the high involvement in learning
tasks is driven by the increasing “invested mental effort", resulting in better performance, and
vice versa. When the teachers are able to encourage and require students to interact with study
materials actively, they are helping them to provoke ‘cognitive schemas' generalization and
discrimination. Some typical activities can be having students manipulate images or
animations, hold procedure steps or run an event, explain those materials by themselves,
process annotations during learning will help stimulate this cognitive load process that is
positively associated with shaping and “storing" knowledge or expertise. Mentioning
‘annotations', it is suggested by the researchers that multiple annotations is even more effective
for ‘low verbal ability’ type learners who are simulated and engaged in a study process that
yields storing the knowledge into ‘cognitive schema’.
(iii) Assessing the expertise level of the learners continuously and by real time can be essential
to adapt and improve instructional materials and methods for more effective online learning
results, to avoid offering “high element interactivity for low expertise learners" or vice versa:
offering “low element interactivity for high expertise learners”
2.2.2. Experience from regular online education:
Because of the newness of the pandemic, there is not yet having research related to its impact
or experience in educating entrepreneurship in a new setup during Covid-19. However, the
author believes that gathering learnings about some principles or what does not work for online
education shall be considered useful. In particular, researchers Iglesias-Pradas et al. (2021)
highlighted key characteristics of preparing and conducting “Emergency remote teaching" to
deal with the “unplanned change": The first principle is, under sudden environmental shift,
simply reproducing work as previously may “lead to failure"; Secondly, the primary
educational objective in this period of time is to offer “temporary access to instruction" which
demands reliable available resources to quickly set up; Thirdly, it requires “creative problem
solving" generated by diverse potential trials of solutions to meet learners, and communities'
emerging needs; Last but not least, a rapid approach always tight with delivered courses'
diminishing quality.
To conduct an effective digital education, the educators should apply systematic development
and design's model, plan the instructions and lectures carefully; by mentioning “careful
planning” for a digital session, it consists of 2 vital components: what contents will be covered,
how to facilitate interactions in various types of approach during the students' learning process.
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2.3. Impact on Entrepreneurship education
The fact that EE is still considered as a “developing field of study" and consists of various
opinions lead to the situation that neither commonly accepted “success indicators" nor a
popular framework of impact measurement is available (Mwasalwiba, 2010).
Assessing effect (impact) refers to seeking the causality that is a different process from
assessing quality and progress (evaluation); the latter’s foundation is following a benchmark,
while the former is based on the “predetermined objectives of an intervention” (Mwasalwiba,
2010 and Hulme, 2000). Mentioning about ‘objective’ in education, it is worthed to take
reference from long established researched of Biggs (1999) “constructive alignment”concept:
Biggs identifies teaching as a ‘complex system’ which comprises the teachers, the learners,
context of teaching, activities of learning, together with outcome; The concept is to examine
major education components' alignment in teaching; Namely, he recommended educators to
look for alignment between: (i) ‘Course objectives’, (ii) ‘Teaching, Learning activities', and
(iii) ‘Assessment tasks':
“The teaching context encourages students to undertake the learning activities
likely to achieve those understandings, and the assessment tasks tell students what
activities are required of them, and tell us how well the objectives have been met”
(Biggs, 1999, p.57 ).
Consequently, to assess the impact of education, it is vital to start by viewing in the lens of
“alignment”, to understand what is the original course objectives which lead to the relevant
courses designs and activities; in the case of EE impact analysis, though the field is fragmented,
researcher Mwasalwiba (2010) reviewed three important “impact indicators”:
(i) ‘graduate start-ups’;
(ii) ‘students’ academic standards’ (assignments’ scores);
(iii) ‘psychological constructs, for example change in students’ attitudes, perceptions, interest,
self-efficacy, confidence, abilities and skills towards entrepreneurship’.
While the latter 2 groups of indicators can be evaluated during or right after each course, the
first indicator ‘graduate start-ups', however, needs five to ten years to monitor since researchers
indicate that is the average amount of time for an entrepreneurship student to build their own
new venture after graduation (Mwasalwiba, 2010). Therefore, in the scope of this thesis, as it
needs a longitude study to find out the result for indicator (i), the author will tentatively ignore
the first indicator and narrow down to the latter 2 perspectives for further investigation and
analysis of the relevant impact when applying digital innovation in EE.
Similar to alignment concept and impact indicators above, in the research of Iglesias-Pradas et
al. (2021) about the effect of “emergency remote teaching”, they also suggested to evaluate if
learners gain intended knowledge and skills, with the “attitudes” that is “directly connected
with learner success”, such as motivation, interest, and level of engagement during learning.
Rooted from alignment concept of scholar Biggs’ (1999), combine with learnings from stated
in above parts which relate to: the core value and nature of EE, its objective, relevant changes
within teaching and studying methods and cognitive load that affect learning’s effectiveness
when shifting to digital, together with impact indicators for EE, the author would like to suggest
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a integrated framework as follow to analyse the process of digitization in EE during Covid- 19
and its impact:
Figure 2: “OHWI" framework, developed by the author from collective literature review.
The suggested framework starts and ends by “O" (Objective) and “I" (Impact), as suggested by
EE researcher Mwasalwiba (2010): To assess impact is to seek the causality, “the
“predetermined objectives of an intervention”. By understanding and restating clearly both “O"
and “I", it helps to avoid over analysing unnecessary results, facts or figures that are not
connected to the aim of education set as the beginning. In the case of this thesis, as we want to
assess impact of digital adoptions in EE due to Covid-19, therefore besides the “objectives of
EE program during Covid-19", it is necessary to cross check if there is any difference from
“the original objectives of EE program". Besides, the framework also involved the learning
from Mwasalwiba (2010) research for the specific indicators used to analyse impact of EE, and
as mentioned previously, ‘graduate start-ups’ is out of scope due to requiring longitude study
instead, ‘students results' indicator is suggested based on the second indicator (ii) ‘students’
academic standards’ recommended by the researcher; the rest of indicators: teachers' and
students' “abilities - skills” gained toward entrepreneurship, the reflection of improvement or
decrease in “self-efficiency", students' self-assess on their “motivation", and teachers'
observation in the level of “engagement” in their lecturing sessions, are key indicators grouped
as “psychological constructs” by the researcher. Furthermore, “motivation" of the learner is
also an important factor correlated to learning performance as CLT presented in 2.3.1, the
author subjectively assume that it would be extremely difficult for the teachers to aware
motivation of all learners, but would be possible to access the engagement as a whole, which
was among one of the expectation of conducting an EE lecture: practical, interacting and
engaging (highlighted in 2.2.2.), that's why “engagement" - “motivation" are the only different
indicators between “impact on teachers" and“impact on students" in respective sequence.
Furthermore, knowing “Objective" and “Impact" although can give us an overview of assessing
if digital adoption during Covid-19 impacts EE program’s objective positively or negatively,
however hardly can the author and readers of this research have further insights about the
deeper causality, the building blocks resulting the impact so as to suggest proper learnings and
initial recommendation, therefore “H" (How) and “W" (What) are 2 building blocks to be
clarified in between, learnt from “constructive alignments of Biggs (1999). These two
components will help to deep dive if ‘teaching and learning activities’ and ‘assessment tasks'
during Covid-19 are well aligned with the EE ‘Objectives', by having each group of audiences:
15
the entrepreneurship educators, and learners answers 2 additional aspects: “How digital
adoption has been implemented", and “What are the teaching methods, or learning activities
after adopting digital solutions".
In short, the framework OHWI will be applied to investigate the topic in the sequence of
understanding following aspects:
(1) essence and overall objectives of EE in each university during Covid-19, compared to the
original purpose [O];
(2) the process of how digital adoption has been implemented in EE [H];
(3) the details of teaching methods and learning activities after adopting digital solutions due
to the pandemic [W]; and
(4) perspectives of the teachers and learners towards the impacts of digital adoption in EE [I].
3. Research strategy
3.1. Research method
As the impact from Covid-19 on higher education, typically on EE, is an emerging topic and
has not been researched widely by scholars, the thesis was conducted as explorative study,
which is most suitable for the purpose of having more understanding about a novel
phenomenon (Yin, 2014); together with qualitative method to capture different thoughts and
point of views from the interviewees, so as to have a deep understanding about the reality
(Bryman and Bell, 2011). In addition, an inductive approach is applied to explore the
complexities of reality, starting blank then filling up with relevant literature and empirical
findings, before “drawing generalizable inferences" (Bryman and Bell, 2011).
3.2. Research philosophy
The philosophical assumptions of this study have two categories: “ontology”, and
“epistemology”, according to the study of Bryman and Bell (2011). For the former, the author
does not tend to the position of “objectivism” since it considers social phenomena and social
actors don't interact with each other but exist independently (Bryman and Bell, 2011); vice
versa, this research refers to “constructionism”, which indicates interactions of various
individuals stimulate change of social reality. For the latter, the author follows the
“interpretivism” principle. Unlike “positivism” research, which is primarily concerned with
explaining behaviours, “interpretivism” underlines the purpose of understanding behaviour,
social action’s ‘how' and ‘why', as well as the processes by which things happen (Bryman and
Bell, 2011), therefore interpretivist is more suitable to the aim and expected output of this
qualitative study.
3.3. Research design
The author conducted this research in the form of multiple cases study. There are various
reasons to support this choice of design. Firstly, due the novelty of the pandemic and different
16
situations across regions and countries, there was no consistent guideline or widely
communicated standard about how digital solutions have been adopted and implemented for
EE program across universities, as well as what changes should be made in teaching and
learning activities, leading to different impacts may occur and potentially diverse learnings to
derive afterward. Consequently, researching different universities increases a variety of
objective approaches, and contributes in the perspective of “external validity” of a study,
indicating to what extent the outputs from the research may become applicable over social
settings. Another reason lies on the characteristics of “multiple case study" itself, according to
Bryman and Bell (2011), this type of research design allows comparing and contrasting
findings derived from each individual case, therefore motivates the researcher to explore
uniqueness and similarities among cases, contribute “theoretical reflection on the findings";
furthermore, it is also recommended that qualitative method is well fit with the design of
exploring and studying cases in-depth.
3.4. Data collections
The data was collected through conducting interviews with teachers and students (“students”
is referred to both current student and fresh graduate in 2020 of Entrepreneurship master
programs), and through researching secondary data, combined with observations. The
description of these different ways of collecting data shown below.
3.4.1. Interviews - the primary data of this research:
The author invited interviewees with “non-probability approach" and “purposive sampling
method” (Bryman and Bell, 2011). There are two groups of stakeholders to interview: Teachers
and students who are currently teaching a course under Master program of Entrepreneurship,
studying or just graduated (in 2020) from the program. Two sets of discussion guides for two
groups of stakeholders were designed, with a semi-structured interview approach to collect the
primary data. This method ensures the topics of discussion covering all details in research
questions, allows the flexibility in sequence of questions, with additional relevant sharing from
the interviewees which may not be in original plan but contributes important findings for the
study, and totally fit with explorative type of study (Bryman and Bell, 2011). Under the
circumstances of Covid-19 outbreak and governments' restriction in travel, all of the interviews
were conducted through video call by the digital applications Zoom, Microsoft Teams and
Whatsapp, depending on the preferences of interviewees. Each interview will be held privately,
meaning one interviewee in a session for spontaneous response from each individual. All
sessions were allowed by the interviewees for audio recording, to capture all of the details in
their answers, as well as demonstrate the effort of being transparent and trustworthy. The name
of Universities are reveal in this report but interviewees’ names and titles remain anonymous,
aligned with privacy concern and request from the respondents.
3.4.2. Sampling:
A purposive sampling has been done on multiple stages. First and foremost, only universities
with a master degree program focusing only on “entrepreneurship” were chosen to keep it
17
consistent when conducting analysis and comparison. For example, “MSc Entrepreneurship
and International Business”, “MSc Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management”, or
“Entrepreneurship and SME Management”, and so on, are some popular master programs
offered by different universities, however, these programs are not the target sample of this
study because of containing more focus then ‘entrepreneurship’. Secondly, the programs
should supposedly study on-campus full time if there is no pandemic. Thirdly, the institute
shall be among QS world top ranking universities (among top 200), or qualified as ‘AACSB’,
the accreditation is recognized worldwide as a guarantee of a high-quality degree. These criteria
are important to ensure the quality of entrepreneurship education programs being analysed in
the research.
The teachers were approached through their universities’ emails which were majorly displayed
on their institute’s web page, or through their Linkedin profiles with ‘In Mail’ feature. The
students were reached via connection from their professors, or from their social media channels
such as Linkedin, Facebook or Instagram. Based on this direction, the author had been sending
emails and messages to a number of potential interviewees, within a limited amount of time
and means of communicating in the pandemic (mainly emails).
As a result, in total the author completed 23 interviews belonging to 6 Master programs in
Entrepreneurship of 7 universities in Sweden, Netherland and Singapore (one joint program of
2 universities), including 12 students and 11 teachers. Among the first group of interviewees,
10 people are currently studying and 2 people just graduated from the Master program of
Entrepreneurship in 2020. Among the educators, 1 teacher is Vice Dean of Master programs,
4 teachers are program coordinators of Entrepreneurship program, 2 teachers are vice program
coordinators, all of them participated in teaching students of Entrepreneurship program.
Because most of the interviewees requested anonymity, their names and titles of all
interviewees are not presented in Table 1 below, instead of that, “Interviewees code” is
displayed in the format from “Teacher 1” to “Teacher 11” to represent 11 interviewees as
Entrepreneurship educators, and from “Student 1” to “Student 12” to stand for 12 interviewees
as Entrepreneurship students.
Table 1 - Primary data
Program name Program
length
University Location Accreditation Interviewees
code
(1) MSc
Entrepreneurship
- joint program of
UvA and VU.
1-year
full time
program
University of
Amsterdam (UvA)
and Vrije
Universiteit
Amsterdam (VU)
Amsterdam,
Netherlands
AACSB Teacher 1
Teacher 2
Teacher 3
Student 1
Student 2
(2) MSc in Venture
Creation (another
name: MSc in
Entrepreneurship)
1year
full time
program
National
University of
Singapore
Singapore AACSB Teacher 4
Student 3
Student 4
(3) MSc in
Entrepreneurship
1-year
full time
Uppsala University Uppsala,
Sweden
AACSB Teacher 5
Student 5
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program Student 6
(4) MSc in
Entrepreneurship
and business
design
2 years
full time
program
Chalmer
University of
Technology
Gothenburg,
Sweden
Rank 139
according to
“QS World
University
Rankings®
2021”.
Teacher 6
Teacher 7
Student 7
Student 8
(5) MSc in Strategic
Entrepreneurship
2 years
full time
program
Jönköping
University
Jönköping,
Sweden
AACSB Teacher 8
Teacher 9
Student 9
Student 10
(6) MSc in
Knowledge-
Based
Entrepreneurship
2 years
full time
program
University of
Gothenburg
Gothenburg,
Sweden
AACSB Teacher 10
Teacher 11
Student 11
Student 12
3.4.3. Secondary data:
The secondary data of the thesis is collected from several sources: The first and foremost is
literature review, broad research of books and articles related to the topics of entrepreneurship
education, cognitive learning theory, digital adoption or digital innovation in education during
Covid-19, with the “peer reviewed" remark in GU library, or with a high amount of citation
(above 500 citations summarized by Google Scholar). The second source is information related
to entrepreneurship courses structures and designs on universities' websites. The third source
is the official report related to teachers or students’ situation during Covid-19, published by
well-known organizations, such as WHO (World Health Organization), WorldBank, and CSN
(the Swedish Board of Student Finance, is a Swedish government agency under the Ministry
of Education and Research) for further analysis. On the other hand, the author approached
universities' administrators to ask for consent on receiving anonymous data of entrepreneurship
program student's assignment results before and during Covid-19, due to constraint of timing
and confidential policy, the author only received data from one university for reference, which
is mentioned in 4.4.1 as part of ‘result’ of ‘Impact of digital adoption in EE’. The aggregation
of these data complemented with answers from interviews for full empirical findings and
analysis of this study.
3.5. Research quality
The ultimate goal of the author is to conduct a master thesis having the research outcome
consistently addresses research purpose and questions set at the beginning, with a good
research quality to be perceived. To assess the quality, there are different viewpoints from
scholars, while Bryman and Bell (2011) indicated that “reliability” and “validity” should be
criteria for quantitative research, LeCompte and Goetz (1982) believed that these
characteristics connected to qualitative study, therefore both criteria just mentioned can be set
19
as a guideline to strive for. For case study research, proving the sample or findings which are
representable is actually not a right approach to assess since it's not associated with this
methodology itself (Siggelkow, 2007). Some demonstrations towards “reliability” to suggest
are semi structured with external social actors (teachers and students) with notes, records,
transcript, and collected data, etc. were performed during the process of researching this thesis
topic, with the effort of proving transparency, and gaining trustworthiness from the readers.
Regarding “validity”, conducting careful analysis with thematic approach considered as
relevant to qualitative findings to perform “depth in research”, which is associated with
“transferability and credibility” (Guba and Lincoln,1994).
4. Empirical findings
Based on ‘OHWI' framework presented in literature review previously, this chapter goes
through the Objectives and key focus of EE in each case of master program, investigating if
there is changes of educational purpose due to the pandemic; followed by How digital adoption
has been adopted in different cases during the time of Covid-19, What teaching methods and
learning activities have been applied to adapt to the situation, and finally the Impacts brought
to the Entrepreneurship program's teachers and the students.
4.1. Objectives and key focus of the EE programs:
Despite the interference of Covid-19, all of the universities and students themselves haven’t
changed their purposes as well as expected outcomes of their master programs in
Entrepreneurship. In almost all cases, the universities have additional objectives when adopting
digital quickly to adapt with the pandemic: (i) transfer from offline to online without delay in
EE program, and try to (ii) learn and improve constantly on the way for better teaching and
learning experience.
The first findings from all of the interviews is that the EE objectives today cover all three
categories mentioned in 2.1 section above (Entrepreneurship education): educating ‘about’,
‘through’ (or ‘in’) and ‘for’ entrepreneurship. These elements have been structured in the
course designs, with a slight difference in level of focus areas differed by cases. In addition,
aligned with the nature of EE (indicated in section 2.2), all institutes emphasize the importance
of putting knowledge into practice, therefore design practical elements reflected in both course
contents and teaching methods in various forms.
For the joint master program of Entrepreneurship organized by University of Amsterdam
(UvA) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), the promise and key focus for students is to
make them entrepreneurial to benefit for their career, either in start-up or well established
corporate. In the teacher’s opinion, “being more entrepreneurial is also good for human beings”
- Teacher 1. The educators expect students to understand theories in mind to allow making
better decisions for organizations (which is ‘about’ entrepreneurship), at the same time to equip
them with essential business skills such as sales and digital marketing, and more importantly,
to have an entrepreneurial attitude that brings value-adding opportunities and ideas into real
life (which is ‘through’ entrepreneurship). Namely, in their one year Master program, first
semester starts by entrepreneurship theories, followed by “The Start-up Project” in which
students apply previously equipped theories, in combination with new instructed framework
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such as “design thinking" and “the lean start-up” to “develop and validate an innovative
business idea” (Amsterdam Business school’s website, 2021). For the second, also final
semester, the students begin with lectures guiding them on their final Master thesis project,
then working in parallel both Master thesis, and one of two options: either an elective course
(such as “Enterprising skills”, “Behavioural Strategy”, or “Corporate Venturing” and so on),
or working for internship which they are successfully recruited by a company, and submit their
Entrepreneurial internship report by the end of the semester. In short, the joint program covers
all three types of entrepreneurship objectives: Educate ‘about’, ‘through' (or ‘in') and ‘for’
entrepreneurship, with higher emphasis on the former 2 objectives; the final objective depends
on the choice of student to either work on their own project in “The Start-up Project” course,
or to start it later after graduation, which is out of control of the educators.
In the case of Uppsala University, the one year Entrepreneurship program structure is quite
similar to the case of UvA and VU joint program, according to Teacher 5, the program is
designed to cover all 3 objectives of EE, however the focus is more on educating ‘for’ and
‘about’ entrepreneurship: On their program's first semester, students have chance to identify
and evaluate their own start-up ideas, and to propose a “full-fledged business plan" (learn ‘for’
entrepreneurship) which potentially “may turn into practice throughout the programme”. For
all students, including both having or not having entrepreneurial ideas in mind, they will get to
know how to organize, to develop a new venture, and to expand it overseas (learn ‘about’
entrepreneurship) . On the next part, the program offers choices for students: either going for a
tutored internship which encourage them to try building their own idea (learn ‘for’
entrepreneurship) or involving a project which contribute to the development of an existing
organization (learn ‘through’ entrepreneurship), another option can also be chosen is to take
coursework to gain more knowledge about ‘corporate entrepreneurship’, and to understand
how to be a ‘successful entrepreneur and business developer'. Furthermore, the program also
has the aim of engaging students in ‘Uppsala Entrepreneurship Programme Alumni Network’
and funding sources to assist students grow their own entrepreneurial network and career even
after graduation.
Turning to Singapore, National University of Singapore (NUS) also has one-year Master
program in Venture Creation (previous name: Entrepreneurship), with higher focus on
educating ‘through' and ‘for' entrepreneurship over 3 categorized objectives, this is the only
case that doesn't include a master thesis as the final outcome of the students, highest credit
among core modules is set for ‘accelerating venture creation' component in their program
structure.
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Figure 3: Core Modules of NUS’ entrepreneurship program (NUS’ website, 2020)
The university offers students an immersive program combining both entrepreneurship's
“experiential learning” and “academic rigour of Asia's top university” (NUS’ website, 2020).
More importantly, mindset transforming and accelerating ideas into practical solutions are
among their key expectations. As an interdisciplinary program of business and engineering
faculties, their students, the potential entrepreneurs are provided opportunities to launch new
successful ventures with the university technologies access, business development mentorship
and entrepreneurial network exposure.
“The idea is to provide people with the opportunity to become more familiar with the
entrepreneurship process and either help them to scale their existing ventures or to start a new
venture”, said by the Vice Dean of Master program in NUS.
The rest of 3 cases belong to universities in Sweden with 2-year master programs in
Entrepreneurship, they are: Chalmers University of Technology, Jönköping University, and
University of Gothenburg that also structure their programs reflecting 3 categories of
educational objectives.
According to Teacher 6, Chalmers “Entrepreneurship and business design” master degree has
more emphasis on educating ‘through’ entrepreneurship to help students develop
entrepreneurial competencies to apply in multiple contexts; the program contains “a lot of
cognitive learning, also a lot is coming from action - based learning and emotional engagement
process”, students are situated in various scenarios of simulated business, together with “real
technology innovation and business projects”. Besides, an additional goal of the program is to
be able to “co-create technology ventures” (Chalmers’ website, 2021). On their first-year study,
the students are equipped with knowledge and competencies through courses; then the whole
second year is for them to work on 2 vital projects parallelly: Master thesis project, and an
entrepreneurial project in which students can choose one of 3 tracks: ‘Technology Venture
Creation track’, ‘Intellectual Capital Management track’, or ‘Corporate Entrepreneurship
Track’ (Chalmers’ website, 2021).
Likewise, in Jönköping University, the Master program in Strategic Entrepreneurship, learning
‘through’ and ‘about’ entrepreneurship is reflected in the majority of course design. The
program provides both “theoretical and practical knowledge”, together with opportunities to
interact with Swedish ventures community and Jönköping’s Science Park (JU’s website, 2020).
The first year of the program includes diverse courses such as “Entrepreneur; Person and
Process”, “Applied International Marketing”, “Family business development” and so on . In
the second year’s first semester, students can choose either working for a local or international
internship that they are successfully offered by a company, or to choose continuing to study
elective courses instead, before working on their final project - master thesis in the final
semester.
“We’d like to think Entrepreneurship not only as Venture Creation, so it’s not about just starting
a business, we tend to have the perspective that Entrepreneurship is a kind of attitude and
behaviour. Students are welcome to have their own project in one course of the program,
however if students don’t want to start their own company, they don’t have to! Since there are
22
also lots of students who want to work for big companies after graduation”, said by the
program’s director.
Therefore, in the course design there are an amount of components related to personal skills
development, in order to help students think and behave entrepreneurially.
Coming to the University of Gothenburg, the course designs reflect more components for the
objective of educating ‘about’ and ‘in’ entrepreneurship. According to Teacher 10, the
education framework can be divided into 2 key aspects: “Regular academic” to prepare for
PhD, and “knowledgeable practitioner”; The latter is slightly more prioritized in the program
with the aim to equip students with knowledge and entrepreneurial capabilities in identifying,
capturing, and creating value for industries and society. The theoretical courses with
integrative, and interactive approach to support personal and business development are taught
in the first 3 semesters (educate ‘about’ entrepreneurship), in which more practical
entrepreneurial projects engagement with GU venture occurs in the second and third semester
(educate ‘through’ entrepreneurship), optional choice for students to combine research and
practical work on their own entrepreneurial ideas in third semester (educate ‘for’
entrepreneurship), before all of them will work on thesis in the final semester. In addition, a
mentorship program is initiated by the teachers to match current students (mentee) with one of
the course’s alumni (mentor) based on their mutually interested areas and expertise. After the
matching process and suggested way of working communication, it is up to each group of
mentor - mentee for further meeting up and discussion.
From the students perspective, their own objectives to take the course can be different from
each other, one third of the interviewees had clearly identified themselves to be a start-up
founder and started their own projects during (or even before) the course, so their key
expectation is to learn how to build a successful new venture with proven entrepreneurial
models to apply, and knowledge to help shaping critical decisions. In other words, their most
prioritized objective is learning ‘for’ entrepreneurship, and to “meet like-minded people”:
“My expectation was to get knowledge of how to found a business, and to meet like-minded
people", said Student 12.
“I really like to learn about entrepreneurship, so that’s why I choose this program, and choose
this university for networking, because it will bring a lot of opportunities to me afterwards. As
I’m an entrepreneur myself, I want to learn, let say, from the theory, then maybe know what I
am missing (in my entrepreneurial project), what do they say. It’s very different when you do
something from practice, or like from what you are just guessing, towards theories out there
suggesting what will be good”, said Student 5, a fresh graduate.
For other students who don’t think they would start-up immediately after their graduation but
want to work for a start-up or demonstrate entrepreneurship in a well established company,
they expect to learn ‘about’ the thorough process from ideas into implementation, and to learn
‘through’ entrepreneurship by equipping essential entrepreneurial skills: “ I like to grow with
the company and to see things that you put into become real life. I want to make progress for
the society and make people's lives easier", said Student 3.
Notably, they all consider the interaction and learning experience together with classmates is
highly valuable, they expect to build a network with each other, and with “real entrepreneurs”,
especially who are successful start-up founders, during their Master program. In short, the
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students have higher priority to learn ‘for’ and ‘through’ entrepreneurship, especially, being
able to apply theories into practical entrepreneurial projects and growing entrepreneurial
networks are top important elements which were emphasized by all of the them when being
asked about their objectives of pursuing an Entrepreneurship master degree, and these goals
don’t change even when the pandemic was happening during their education.
As can be seen in all cases, the objectives of both Entrepreneurship teachers and students
aligned with all three categories mentioned by Alliance Fayolle and researchers in the literature
review: learn ‘for’, ‘about’ and ‘through’ ( or ‘in’) entrepreneurship but with slightly different
emphasis depending on each program’s design, and various ways of engagement with the
entrepreneurial community, in which majorly cooperates with venture partners in the region,
and offers graduates exposure to Alumni network.
On the other hand, another mutual purpose and key focus of all programs are on the goal of
offering students highly interactive and practical entrepreneurial projects involvement, aligned
with the nature of EE discussed in 2.2.2. Confronting the situation of Covid-19 outbreak, all
had the additional goal of avoiding delay or postponement in their program, and maintaining
original EE objectives regardless of the ‘interference’ of the pandemic.
“It’s particularly challenging when in all of sudden being situated in a digital way instead of
being situated in actual interaction. Fundamentally we still try to achieve everythings that we
achieved before with the same objectives”, said Teacher 6.
Reviewing the emphasis of educational objectives between teachers and students perspectives,
we can recognize that: in the academy view, there are higher amount of courses relevant to
educate ‘through’ and educate ‘about’, followed by elements related to educate ‘for’
entrepreneurship; in the perspective of students, they focus the most in learning ‘for’ and
‘through’ entrepreneurship with opportunities to build network with peers and successful
entrepreneurs to benefit for their own start-up in the future, while involving in practical
entrepreneurial projects, on the basis of being equip theoretical knowledge to found a new
venture and shape business decision.
EE Objectives Before Covid-19 During Covid-19
Universities
programs -
Teachers’
perspectives
Although having slight differences in course
focus, 6 master programs have course design
reflecting all three categories of
Entrepreneurship educational objectives:
(1) Educate ‘through’/‘in’ entrepreneurship
(emphasized entrepreneurially practical projects
involvement and entrepreneurial context
stimulations).
(2) Educate ‘about’ entrepreneurship
(emphasized knowledge and framework to form
decisions and to drive the process).
(3) Educate ‘for’ entrepreneurship
(opportunity to work on students’ own project in
one of the courses, exposure to entrepreneurial
networks such as alumni and partners’ ventures
with funding chances).
Remain the same as
before Covid-19, add
an additional goal of
adopting digital
solutions to continue
the master programs in
safety and without
delay.
24
Students’
perspectives
Almost all students share similar overall
expectation from the program they pursue:
(1) Learn ‘through’/‘in’ entrepreneurship
(emphasized the need of socializing and
contributing in the progress of entrepreneurial
projects by applying equipped knowledge).
(2) Learn ‘for’ entrepreneurship
(emphasized the need of Networking to benefit
their own start-up or future career).
(3) Learn ‘about’ entrepreneurship
(emphasized the need of understanding the
process of entrepreneurship)
Remain the same as
before Covid-19.
Table 2: Summary of objectives and key focus of EE programs before and during the time of
Covid-19 outbreak.
4.2. How digital solutions have been adopted
To begin with how the digital adoption process has been implemented, it is reminded by almost
all interviewees that it has been hard for the Entrepreneurship educators, Graduate school
Director boards, even the Deans, Vice-Chancellor of universities, to make decisions of the
dramatic change of school closures or open and by when, since the universities need to base on
restriction regulations and guidelines from Government, and even the Governments' decisions
also depend on the dramatic change of the Covid-19 outbreak. Under this pandemic, many
aspects are vulnerable, therefore there have been a lot of announcements, planned duration for
digital switching were announced in earlier phase but then continuous extension of studying
online period have been re-updated. However a mutual principle and process of communication
has been applied in all cases:
(i) The universities closely and timely update official regulations and recommendations from
the government, and structure the information quickly to all of the students via email.
(ii) The decision of shifting to digital mode is not under the control of Entrepreneurship
program management, nor Faculty level but up to university level. However, for the details of
how to deal with the transition in each program, the program directors or coordinators, and the
teachers have autonomy to design their courses and teaching activities responding to the
situation.
(iii) Towards the students, the notices of both expected timing to receive an official decision
for the upcoming study period, and announcement of changes have been clearly communicated,
together with the highlights for international students.
(iv) All of the relevant notification, announcement, and updates related to the outbreak and its
impact on teaching and studying mode, regulations and recommendations for activities in
schools are not only sent through emails as mentioned in (ii) and (iii), but also a new landing
page, which was quickly created to centralize all information in one site and belong to the main
web page of the universities.
25
In Sweden and Netherland, the earliest announcement from the Graduate School to the students
was on end of February, to recommend all staffs and students to avoid traveling to, or to stay
at home after visiting “risk areas", followed by government recommendation:
“Due to the continued spread of the Coronavirus COVID19, all staff at the School of Business,
Economics and Law are advised to refrain from travel to China, South Korea and Iran, as well
as to the Lombardy and Veneto regions in Italy. Employees and students who enter from these
areas are strongly advised to work from home and not visit the School for a period of fourteen
days after returning home. These restrictions are likely to need to be revised at short intervals”
(Email sent to all students of School of Business, Economics and Law, Gothenburg University,
Sweden on 28 Febraruay 2020).
At the beginning of the second week of March 2020, the same recommendation was repeated,
classes were still organized as it had been, only the “risk areas" extended to additional areas in
North Italy, and two other regions of China (Hong Kong and Macau). Then the list was
continuously extended to the whole country of Italy and Tyrol in Austria in 2 more days. And
just one day later, the shift to distance - online learning was announced officially by the
universities through email and timely updated on Graduate School's websites, example shown
in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4: Part of Covid-19 update in March 2020 of UvA (UvA's website, 2020).
The original plan of the university was to shift to digital study from mid March 2020 until the
end of Spring semester 2020. A number of updates about the Covid-19 outbreak in the country
as well as the regulations and recommendations from governments were continuously informed
to students in emails. In June 2020, the universities had to inform a blended approach for the
new school year - Autumn semester 2020 at least until October 2020, in which majority of
classes and exams will be conducted online, some classes can be conducted offline with case
by case agreement with the management. However, by that time, the digital set up was extended
26
to the end of the Autumn semester 2020, as the increase of Coronavirus infected people in the
winter lead to the apply of stricter regulation, and continuously, digital learning mode has been
prolonged until Spring semester of 2021. Similar to almost all programs, Entrepreneurship
courses have been conducted online from mid March 2020 until the end of Spring semester
2021.
Namely, Sweden and Netherlands’ universities decided to continue the semester without any
delay compared to the original timing of a standard semester, as how it has been run for years,
and all courses of Entrepreneurship would be conducted online. The regulation of operating on
digital instead of on-campus was decided in a short time for health concerns to the community
at the end of first period in Spring semester 2020, when the teachers just completed their final
lectures of on going courses, and students had 2 weeks preparing for their examinations in this
first period of semester. Two weeks was also the duration for the teachers to discuss and to
decide the exam formats which would happen shortly, in parallel to prepare for the lectures of
the second period in the Spring semester (for the teachers of 2 year master programs), or to
supervise students for their master thesis project.
“We had discussions about digital classrooms previously, however never had we needed to
implement everything in such a short period of time!” said Teacher 12.
In order to assist the teachers, all universities had the policy to encourage the teachers “bring
office to home" such as the big screen, speaker, etc., and the transition, though stressful because
of its newness and limited time, has been implemented in an encouraging and supportive
atmosphere for the teachers. None interviewees felt negative with the fact that they must pay
additional effort in changing during this transition, they claimed that they were being “forced
to change" due to Covid-19, but all appreciate the way of operating and decision from the
University, as it expressed the prioritization on keeping everyone safe. The teachers and the
students have been sharing the understanding and feeling that everyone needs to put extra effort
during this special time, and this was the first experience for everyone.
In addition, instruction and tutorial materials, together with technology assist activities have
been organized to support all stakeholders during the digital shift. In every case, many online
tutoring workshops about how to create video clips, how to stimulate interactions, and
instruction materials were sent to both teachers and students, especially for the teachers who
needed to prepare their first online lectures in 2 weeks. In Jönköping University, the IT
department takes the lead in the whole digital transition process with diverse workshop, timely
assistance for teachers to run their online classroom smoothly. In VU, the young teachers
actively approached the senior teachers to offer help if there were any problems they needed
support.
“I received a lot of help. And, I’m not hesitating to ask a younger colleague about IT too, don’t
walk around with your problem too long!” said Teacher 2.
At University of Amsterdam, a crisis team was formed quickly to help the teachers during the
transition, there is a department in charge of gathering all kinds of best practices of online
teaching to share among teachers to learn on the way, and another department in charge of
standardizing way of working of teaching during the pandemic, their guidelines are considered
27
as suggestion for teachers to reference, not as a fixed regulation to follow. In Chalmers
University of Technology, “peer to peer” program was held, the teachers in pairs had their
“buddy” to ask for concern, to share experience to improve along the way. Similarly, in the
University of Gothenburg, monthly or bi-monthly meetings among the teachers have injected
a session to share about digital teaching experience, problems, lessons and tips to run digital
classes.
Being pressured by a limited time and emergency of the outbreak makes the change happen,
the teachers admitted that it can be divided into 2 phases of implementing:
Phase (1) was from mid March until the end of Spring semester (June) 2020, every program
needed to adopt digital teaching mode for all of their remaining courses of entrepreneurship in
this semester (and similar to other faculties in the universities), the ultimate goal was more
about how to “translate” or “transfer" from offline classroom to online classroom. Depending
on each teacher, however, according to the observations of the interviewees, many online
classes had the duration with lecture slides same as on campus’ lectures, just that the technique
to run the class needed to be adapted to digital. This was considered as “experiment period" for
the teachers. In contrast, for the Master of Entrepreneurship programs that just last for 1 year
as the case of Uppsala, or joint degree of University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, the teachers almost didn't have Entrepreneurship courses to teach in this last period
of semester since the students were taking the internship and working on their thesis, therefore
they had more time to prepare for courses for new students who they would meet at “phase 2".
Phase (2) is from Autumn semester 2020 until the present - Spring semester 2021: After trying
different techniques and listening to sharing from colleagues for the first phase, the teachers
now have more reflection and improving options, from “experimental phase", now they are in
“more experienced phase". In this phase, Chalmers had organized instruction sessions on
campus to welcome new students of their Entrepreneurship program, to let students get to know
each other face to face before joining all of the other sessions remotely. For the joint program
of UvA and VU, when the regulation was slightly relaxed in September - October, the
university had a pilot “live stream” session, in which students were encouraged to come to the
campus (following 1.5 meter distance when having seat in classroom), the teacher would hold
the class as regularly, however there would be camera to live stream the whole classroom for
students who couldn't attend in campus. Except for these 2 sessions, all of the other courses,
including exams and assignments were continued submitting through online.
On the other continent in Asia, Singapore, NUS had quite a similar approach for other Master
programs, but MSc in Venture Creation (also named as MSc in Entrepreneurship) program is
among the exceptions because of its own nature with required education standard.
For majority of programs, NUS also needed to shift completely to digital teaching:
“It all started in late March 2020. The Singapore government recognized corona as a big
problem and started to introduce more strategic management and control. We are in the third
last week of the semester, and at that time we had to shift completely to online teaching. Up
until then we’ve been experiencing different ways to keep people safe like temporary checks
and so forth, and some people were wearing masks. We just had to get to the end of the
semester, so we took everything online, completed the program the best as we could, try to set
up proper protocol for lectures and exams... Then we have a few weeks to review, to think
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about what we should do for August 2020 intake, provided that the lock down situation didn’t
stop at the time, and provided that we are permitted for August 2020 - Nov 2020 with a
combination of face to face and virtual” said Teacher 4.
Moving to the new semester started in August 2020, instead of completely online teaching, the
university implemented a hybrid mode of offline learning in conjunction with ‘virtual’ classes
for almost all master programs. By mentioning ‘virtual’, NUS teacher refers to the set up quite
similar to the pilot ‘live stream’ session of UvA and VU mentioned previously, in which
students are encouraged to participate in face to face sessions, and the learners who are not able
to come to Singapore yet or don’t feel safe to be in school physically can connect via Zoom,
and receive the live broadcast capturing what is happening inside that classroom.
However, their master program in Venture Creation (Entrepreneurship) has a different
approach. Originally, the one year Entrepreneurship program would begin officially in
August 2020 as below course timeline:
Figure 5: NUS’ original program structure and timeline (NUS’ website, 2021).
However, the educators in NUS believe that for their program, “experiential entrepreneurship
internship”, practical interaction and networks are considered vital elements to achieve their
objectives of educating this major, therefore the decisions were:
Firstly, its intake was shifted from August 2020 to January 2021, when “the environment is
more conducive for face to face” (Teacher 4). For NUS, the assigned internship is a strict
standard to achieve, the university coordinates both sides: the SMEs and the students, and it
needs to happen offline for the students to engage, to learn and to work on practical projects in
company's offices, while attending 2 other classes per week to equip entrepreneurial skills and
knowledges about “New venture creation".
29
Secondly, for the sessions related to business skills or having the need of high interaction to
stimulate skills development, the university would organize the campus which has strictly
followed social distancing regulation while allowing the teachers and students to come to the
offline classroom venue to study, to ensure delivering expected quality of educating
entrepreneurship. For example, “negotiation" business skill would be a type of class that
required to happen on campus, when the regulation at that time capped maximum gathering
was 25 people, the Entrepreneurship course students would be offered 2 schedules (since their
class size is about 50) to choose 1 among them, and each schedule would only allow maximum
25 students to register, and the same principle would be applied if the maximum gather number
changed. The teacher of this negotiation class would deliver lectures twice, face to face for
different groups of students. For all stakeholders when coming to the campus, they would need
to Safety guideline of the universities, such as: Health Declare on the app, measure temperature
and clean hands before entering inside the campus, move within assigned “zone" in the campus
per instruction for each group of stakeholder, and having seat in classroom with 1 - 2 meters
distance to each other (differed by each period of time per Government guideline).
Thirdly, for a type of “knowledge transferring" sessions, or the session of business knowledge
that was not exclusive for Entrepreneurship students but is the mutual sessions of other
programs in the university, these sessions can be conducted in ‘virtual’ mode. Notably, face to
face setup remains the recommended modality.
“Digital has been existing for long (such as video conferencing, webinar…), virtual doesnt help
socialization and network come from face to face interaction”, “if you want a transactional
experience or knowledge where you're learning how to do computer coding, certain math skills,
relearning some basic econometrics… that maybe this one (digital teaching) is fine, because
then you're just imparting knowledge from one person to another person; But if you create
socialization and you're trying to help people to learn how to function better in organizations,
to make decisions better in organizations and to lead veteran organizations then you absolutely
need to teach face to face”, said Teacher 4.
In term of the assist for teachers, besides having instruction materials and best practice sharing,
in NUS the teacher has a teaching assistant participate together, while the teachers adopt these
new digital application with the focus of delivering the course content the best as they can, the
teacher assistant monitor subordinate activities, such as reminding the students turn on camera,
centralized the received questions on subscreen from the students to transfer them to teacher,
and to assist any students who can't stay online or participate in the session.
Overally, in order to monitor this process of adopting digital entrepreneurship education, most
of the universities based on ‘course evaluation survey' and online meeting with student
representatives to gather feedback. However, the respondent rate is often not so high, or even
get lower during the pandemic. Therefore, while part of the interviewed educators usually
review and take into consideration for adjustment or improvement based on the survey
feedback, some other teachers don't really buy in the survey result but rely more on their own
interaction with students and class representatives, so as to gain more insights and inputs.
As the university and the teachers play key roles and responsibility in organizing either campus
or online classes, the students have been put in the position of being reactive during this process
30
of adopting digital tools for entrepreneurship learning. Apart from announcements and
notifications which were informed by their lecturers and universities, the students also received
a number of instructions from the universities related to how to synchronize their Zoom account
with the school's email, as well as instructional materials related to the application usage.
Nevertheless, rarely do the students think that they need to go through all details of the
instructions, since they have been familiar with regular social application for the basic features
of video calling, file sharing, and group chatting, ect., together with the fact that Zoom is
recognized as an user friendly and easy to use tool.
To Summarize this session, before officially adopting digital solutions, there have been timely
updated notifications communicated through email, and updated through an additional web
page in the university website to centralize all relevant updates, regulations during the time of
Covid-19. The decision of shifting to digital study was made by the University level, in close
connection to Government's regulation. However the entrepreneurship teachers have autonomy
to decide how they would conduct lectures and organize classes as they are the one playing a
critical role in handling this dramatic shift to new study mode in very limited timing. Under
time pressure but encouraging atmosphere of change implementation, the educators have put
great effort in transferring courses from offline to online, ensuring the program's continuity as
a key goal to achieve in the first milestone (end March to June 2020), then improving constantly
from collective experience in later phases (from Autumn semester 2020 until Spring semester
2021). While completely digital mode was decided by all interviewed programs for the first
milestone, this modality was prolonged in next phases in almost all cases, except MSc in
Venture Creation (Entrepreneurship) program of NUS. Their educators decided to delay new
intake from August 2020 to January 2021 so as to achieve expected educational standards for
the program with hybrid setup, in which the majority of the entrepreneurship class is conducted
face to face, with only a few virtual sessions being held. Overally, to make the transition
happen, the teachers also received various assistance from the university, such as the support
from the IT department with instructions materials and workshops, ‘peer to peer' program,
‘bring office home’ assist, best practice sharing and so on. For the students, they received
detailed instructional materials for digital application usage, and the part they paid most
attention to was about embedding their school's account into Zoom, as its general features are
familiar enough and easy to use.
4.3. What are Entrepreneurship programs' teaching methods and learning activities
that have been changed after adopting digital solutions?
As mentioned above, Master programs in Entrepreneurship in all cases have been transferred
to almost 100%, except NUS where hybrid mode is applied (but more prioritized for face to
face mode). It is the first time both teachers and students need to actively try a lot of online
solutions to assist their teaching and learning experience. There are 2 basic digital applications
that being chosen and used widely among universities:
The first is Canvas platform, which is a centralized platform to: (i) store all of essential
documents related to study materials, lecture slides, schedules and announcements; (ii) a
“replacement” of exam hall, where in students upload their assignments, final exams which
will be automatically uploaded on Urkun database for plagiarization detect; (iii) embed Zoom
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meeting links online classes of each course; and (iv) communicating by text with the class and
lecturer on discussion forum or in mail features. Note that the final features (iv) are not often
used by students and lecturers accordingly, and there are some universities such as University
of Gothenburg, Chalmers and Uppsala that have been using the platform before Covid-19, the
rest of cases started adopting it in Spring semester 2020. For NUS, a similar features platform
is also being used internally, called LumiNUS, built on their own.
The second digital application that is used in all cases is Zoom. At first there was some
consideration to use Microsoft Team, however Zoom become the “winner" because it is easy
to use and to scale, have good features supporting lecturing, and more importantly, its audio
quality goes well, doesn't take many other assisting technical tools, and in most of the cases,
Zoom was introduced and tried in universities even before the pandemic already, though only
among some groups of teachers. However it was the important “bridge" to become the chosen
application, since at that time the academy faced an “emergency" and they didn't want to waste
too much time on experiencing too many other options that had never been tried before.
Regarding teaching method, prior to the sudden change caused by Covid-19, it has been a
diverse approach depending on the preference of the educators and course contents. It can be a
theoretical session in a big study hall where teachers present their lectures via slide show,
observing and encouraging students to raise questions for further explanation and discussion,
then staying in the classroom in break time for casual catch up among the teachers and the
learners. It also can be a small case competition, the teacher divides the class into groups to
discuss with available flip charts as assisting tools for students; the teacher goes around the
classroom, observes, coaches the students, and has them present their proposed solutions. Other
typical methods are student run workshops, pitching presentations to ‘sell’ students'
entrepreneurial ideas, etc. All have high emphasis on stimulating entrepreneurial interaction
and engagement, as the nature of EE and also challenge to “bring” these aspects into digital
teaching mode.
The educators have been trying various features of Zoom such as dividing different area on the
screen to show lecture and chat box at the same time so as to notice about students' questions;
to stimulate interactions by dividing the virtual class with “breakout room" features and make
sure frequently visit students to give timely advice and clarification; or to create “polling" to
have questions related to the lectures for students' better understanding. Notably, there is
actually no consistent method applied across courses or universities, the method is deferred by
the preference, experience, and digital skill set of each teacher.
Apart from features within Zoom, several teachers adopted another digital application called
Mentimeter to “check-in" before the class officially starts, with the aim to encourage students
to share their top of mind related to the course. Unlike Zoom and other applications, the latest
chats would always display at the most obvious position, and continuously pull up the older
comments, Mentimeter allows students to raise concerns or share their answers by leaving
comments individually without interrupting other classmates, at the same time supports
teachers to view all questions quickly and provide answers more promptly. By using this
application as a warm up opening for the online class, the questions raised by the teacher can
be a question related to a statement in the assigned reading materials, or simply “How are you
today?”, “What is your thinking about today's lesson?” The teacher expected to pull up the
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energy among the students to help them increase motivation in studying. According to Teacher
7, educating is not only about transferring knowledge, it’s also about building relationships
with the students, to let them feel engaged and motivated to study. Especially during the
pandemic, the students have spent effort in learning through a new set up with digital tools, it
leads to the concern of cognitive load pressure during this period of time. Back to on campus
teaching, he usually comes a bit earlier to class, or stay in the hall during break time, because
he wants to encourage student sharing their concern about the lecture with him, so that he can
either offering further explanation, or adjust his lecture next time to ensure the students can
handle the knowledge more firmly. In the situation of Covid-19, this kind of environment is no
more allowed, so he tries the best to motivate and encourage students by asking them to share
opinions, with different tools and features like Mentimeter, breakout room in Zoom, or simply
changing his habit in replying email: Instead of having regular set schedule to answer email for
the students, in this period of time, he tries to answer every email of the students as immediately
as possible, since he believes that when the students are having question and sending email to
him, they are in need of the answer to continue their self-learning, and by answering quickly
to them, they would feel motivated (especially in social distancing time), and more importantly,
less hesitate to ask him further questions.
Figure 5: Examples of Mentimeter interface in showing questions and
answers. (Mentimeter's website, 2021)
During the lecture, Kahoot is another favorable application helping teachers to set up a small
contest with various questions in multiple choices format, the students only need to visit
relevant web pages, name themselves formally or personally based on their interest, and
participate in the “contest" without hesitation of being right or wrong. This activity helps the
teachers to achieve 2 key goals: (i) excite the students with online interactions to cover the loss
of social interaction during the pandemic, (ii) to self-assess if the students have the right
understanding towards the lectures and given reading articles.
Interactive, engaging discussion which sharpens entrepreneurial skills and applies knowledge
into simulated situations, or practical new venture projects are among key goals to achieve for
Entrepreneurship educators. For some teachers, after observing their colleagues or reflecting
their own experience in transferring a 2-hour offline class to a 2-hour online class instead,
although with a lot of effort of injecting various features of Zoom, they realize that it doesn't
work effectively. There are teachers who decided to shorten the lecturing duration by having
a pre-recording uploaded on Canvas for students to watch at any time, then having another
separate session only for online Q and A (questions and answers). There are other teachers,
who shift the method to “more coaching" instead of focusing on “lecturing". Namely, instead
of having a 2 hour class for lectures, he splitted the class into 2 sessions, 1 hour each. All
students would be given a pre-reading materials which can be a 10 minutes video, or a case, or
33
a new theory, then joining the online class, 4 team would be in each 1 hour session, share their
thought or solutions towards the assigned topic, and the teachers would have 15 minute
dedicated to coach each group, including encouraging the rest of 3 groups to give feedback or
raise questions to the group who just presented. The teachers believed this process would
stimulate entrepreneurial skills and sharpen analytical thinking and problem solving skills,
which are vital for an entrepreneur. An interesting finding during this process of reflection and
refining the lecture, is that the teacher even self questioned: It's clear that 2 hour is too long for
an online lecture, however it seems too long as well for an on campus class which he used to
deliver.
When being asked about the kinds of features being used to assist teaching, Teacher 4 in NUS
answered: “People. We need somebody to manage the system, making sure the instructor can
focus on the classroom’s interaction, and then someone else focus on the technical aspects
(such as login in, link, not receive audio, etc.).” Furthermore, he also shared his own experience
of interaction in the virtual classroom: “we need to optimize only 1 option, cannot optimize for
both: people attend virtually and people in the classroom. I choose to make an interactive
classroom, and focus on in person interaction by supplementing a “coffee chat" with virtual
people to speak face to face to resolve their concerns. Focusing on both will dissatisfy both”.
The change didn't happen only for way of teaching, but also way of having exam:
Majority of the teachers chose to change the types of questions in the exam to less “memoring
question" (the questions for checking memory related to certain theory), but more synthetic
analytical question (students would need to learn all required knowledge to be able to answer),
together with minor question mentioning directly a statement shared by guest lecture (only
students who really attended the session can answer).
For some teachers, they decided to shorten the exam duration so that students have no time to
discuss with others.
In some cases, such as the universities in Netherland requiring students to download a digital
application employing Artificial Intelligence technique to play role as a camera observing the
students while they are taking the exam at home, the assessors will receive both assignments
and the video clip of students movement during the exam to monitor if they are violating exam
regulations. For some other courses, instead of downloading the digital application, the students
are asked to submit all of their notes in the draft especially for courses related to entrepreneurial
financing. However, for these methods of controlling, normally the teachers - the examiners
don't spend much time watching these recording videos or spend very little time on checking
the notes. The tools are more about raising awareness of students to do exams with high
integrity.
Towards the above variety of teaching methods after adopting digital solutions, when
interviewing the students, overall they appreciate the educators' effort and online practices
keeping the engagement and interaction mentioned above, except for ‘pre-recording’ sessions.
As to their view, some lecturers recorded a series of long pre-recording audio (almost 1 to 2
hour, or even longer) and embedded in boring presentations mostly with written text could not
motivate them to have questions in the separate schedule for Q&A; as normally, it would be
easier to raise concerns in a more interactive environment where students could learn from their
classmates’ questions too. Some other lecturers remain unchanged with their online slideshow
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brought from previous offline materials, or keep “one way communication” with very little
consideration about the connectivity with students on the other side behind Zoom screens.
“I really don't mind 2 hour class, but I did like the shorter motive clip, it will “click" your
attention into the frame”, said Student 9.
These type of sessions were mentioned by many students as “worst class”. The complaints also
raised by students who need to attend online for the type of “live stream” class: “They tried to
broadcast from the lecture room. But the teacher focuses on students in the room, and the board
is hard to read”.
Contrastly, there are several sessions “voted” by the students as their best digital learning
experience as well. Most of them prefer a short video (less than 30 minutes) as good pre-view
material to help them absorb the information better and more lively, instead of only gathering
information from written text with articles to read, followed by a coaching or interactive
discussion in online Zoom class. For student 7, he especially felt impressed and engaged with
how his teacher combined various digital solutions (Mentimeter, Kahoot, polls, etc.) for a
theoretical Zoom lecture which he used to think could be boring. For Student 11, he likes how
the professors divide the complicated theory into smaller components, and guide them through
each building block of that theory with relevant practices and examples. Student 12 feels he
learnt the most by working in a group to run his first digital workshop. Even though having to
wear masks, to keep distance when coming to class and to work as an intern for assigned SME
projects, Student 3 and Student 4, though feeling pressure with a tight schedule, clearly realize
their own improvement as learning entrepreneurial knowledge and applying them into assigned
projects at the same time.
Among the students’ learning activities, while Zoom is a mandatory digital application to adopt
to join classes, coaching sessions with the teachers or with business mentors for their
entrepreneurial projects, they also tried various additional applications to serve online
presentation and group work activities. In the former activity, besides powerpoint slide shows
and sometimes with videos injection to create the diversity in way of delivering contents to
audience, Kahoot is a favorable application for many students, to bring more engagement and
interaction in their virtual presentation to the class, such as putting the link of their quiz on
Kahoot on the class’ Zoom chat box, asking classmates to click in multiple choices or fill in
the answers of questions related to their presentation. For group work, even before the
pandemic, Google Drive has been a familiar platform to upload, to store materials that can be
easily shared among groups, as well as instant editing and saving word, excel or powerpoint
documents with multi group member access and immediate saving online. On the other hand,
having more interactive discussion and timely update project management are important to-dos
for students, and a lot of them use Slack for those purposes. While being as engaging as it was
with group work brainstorming before pandemic has been a challenge for many entrepreneurial
students, there is a case of interviewee, who started his program during the pandemic and digital
setup, shared about Miro, which is an idea application for his team's virtual ideation and
brainstorming, with many specific templates and tools for entrepreneurial users. For instance,
“Brainstorming" online template stimulating the offline experience of group brainstorming by
putting sticky notes on a white board (figure 6), another examples are numerous templates for
entrepreneurship such as business models canvas, “The Pitch Canvas" (figure 7), and so on,
35
allowing user for more productive group work and discussion with suggested contents and
spaces to fill in online.
Figure 6: Miro’s brainstorming framework (Miro’s website, 2021)
36
Figure 7: Miro's framework related to Entrepreneurship study - The Pitch Canvas (Miro’s
website, 2021)
Group work is not just related to a team's verbal presentations and projects’ brainstorming,
discussion, etc. Student 2 discovered that she could improve her own efficiency with reading
tasks, with her group by an application called Perusall. The application supports users to upload
reading materials in articles, textbooks or videos, and the students can collaboratively annotate
with the other teammates who can see those annotations in real time. Connecting to literature
review with CLT implications (in previous chapter at 2.2.1), annotating while learning will
benefit for cognitive load process, especially for ‘low verbal ability’ type of learners to engage
in a different way in a learning process, and construct ‘cognitive schema’ - turning the new
information becoming knowledge more effectively.
Figure 8: Example of users interface of Perusall in reading an article (Derek Bruff, 2020).
Notably, only a few students who could not travel to the city where their university is located
would have all of their studying activities - both individual and group work online. At the same
time, “free rider" teammate situation seems to happen more in the groups of students who had
never met their classmates face to face, especially the students who are currently studying their
one year Master program.
“There is a guy in my team who I and other teammates never have any chance to talk to during
class, and have never “met” him online even though the group meeting schedule was sent to
him, and we don't know how to deal with that!” said Student 2.
For the students who are studying second year in their two year Master program and
experienced first academic year almost all on campus, they admit that for their virtual group
work, it went quite well in the perspectives of having everyone working on their parts and keep
things progress, because they knew and talked to each other face to face in the first year already,
it helped a lot for more harmony group work.
“I can't imagine how things are going with the first year students, it will be so hard if you have
never met each other and need to work with each other for many projects!” said Student 11.
In fact, more than half of interviewees as students or fresh graduates mentioned that even
though they could not meet in school, they always prioritize offline gathering for group work
since the group size is smaller than the capped maximum gathering by the government policy,
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some students tried attending online class via zoom but sitting together with one or two
classmate sometimes to increase physical interaction on their own, given the lack of
socialization during the pandemic.
In summary, all Entrepreneurship programs’ teachers and students have made a strong attempt
during the process of adopting digital solutions, to turn the familiar face to face classrooms -
study halls with big screens, flipcharts, whiteboards... into an “education world inside a 12 - 13
inch of laptop screen”, said Teacher 6, with the effort of remaining intrinsic of EE’s practicality
and dynamic engagement as much as possible. What teaching methods and learning activities
have been adapted and applied during the digital adoption in EE have been briefly captured in
table below:
What has
been
changed
Methods before
Covid-19
Adopted
applications
during Covid-19
Key features Relevant
concerns
Teaching
methods
Canvas (some
universities) /
LimuNUS (in
NUS)
Canvas (all
universities
except NUS)/
LimuNUS
Central hub (lectures’
materials, schedule,
assignment submission,
etc)
Face to face
classroom,
teachers and, or
guest speakers
observe, interact,
coach, invite
discussion from
students with full
facilities.
Zoom (100% for
almost all
interviewed
programs,
except NUS)
Breakout room (to divide
groups for discussion and
coaching), polls (for
Q&A), chat (to raise
questions), pre-record
videos (as part of pre-
view materials or as a full
lecture).
help interaction
during Covid-19,
but missing the
dynamics of face
to face
discussion.
Mentimeter Can fill in, view and
present all answers for a
question at once, without
the need of scrolling up
and down as Zoom’s chat
box.
Kahoot Nice interfaces for
different types of Q&A.
Learning
activities
Group face to
face meeting.
Miro Brainstorming, group
work with
Entrepreneurship template
The tools are
helpful in digital
setup, but hard to
discuss and to
build up idea
without face to
face observation,
majority of
students prioritize
to meet and work
offline
Slack Project management and
group communication
Individual
reading,
discussing in a
group's face to
face meeting for
concerns and
progress updates.
Perusall Upload articles or video
for group’s
collaboratively reading,
annotating and progress
update.
38
Table 3: Summary of what teaching methods and learning activities have changed after
adopting digital solutions.
4.4. Impact of digital adoption in EE
4.4.1. Perspective of the teachers
(1) Result:
The author invited the interviewees (Entrepreneurship educators) to evaluate and to compare
the students' assignments, exams results between pre-Covid-19 (on-campus) and during Covid-
19 (digital adoption period), all of the educators indicated that it was hard to compare because
of many variables that are not equivalent, for example the exam format has been changed, and
the exam's questions type and structure also differed to adapt with the emergent transition to
digital brought by the pandemic.
Throughout the interviews, the educators reflected that it was also a nice surprise since they
didn't observe any significant decline, or even slight increase in the exam result. Some teachers
felt that several courses had very positive scores, those are the open exams with synthetic
analytical questions. In Chalmers, in the second year of the Master program students would
have 2 big assignments in parallel: Entrepreneurial project and master thesis; and the professor
was surprised to receive early submission from the students who completed their thesis in
March, 3 months before the deadline, which rarely happens.
Nevertheless, a typical format of entrepreneurship course’s assignment, which required student
groups to sell a new product or service, ended with lower sales results compared to the time
before Covid-19, as during the pandemic, the students only could sell through digital platforms.
However that was just one of the metrics to monitor the performance, the most important
aspects for the teachers to assess was the process and ability of the students in demonstrating
their entrepreneurship in front of ambiguities, and in applying knowledge into practical
planning and execution.
On the other hand, the actual results of 11 courses of a Master program among the interviewed
cases provides an additional insight. The author splits the assignments results into 2 categories,
the first category is individual performance of assignments and exams, the second category is
group performance (note that there were several courses did not have group assignments so the
number of courses in each category are not the same, and the grading scale of this case is:
Excellent (A), Very good (B), Good (C), Satisfactory (D), and Fail (F)). In each figure below,
due to the confidential reason, the course names were numbered and marked as “Pre Covid-1",
“Pre Covid-2", etc. represent the courses' exams that happened before the pandemic and digital
adoption; vice versa, “In Covid-1", “In Covid-2", etc. present the rest of courses' assignments
that needed to conduct remotely.
39
Figure 9: Individual performance by courses of an Entrepreneurship program before and
during Covid-19 (source: from an university's data)
Figure 10: Group performance by courses of an Entrepreneurship program before and during
Covid-19 (source: from an university's data)
As shown in 2 charts above, firstly for individual performance, it was agreeable that regardless
the impact of Covid-19, the proportion of students receiving “excellent” (A) and “very good"
(B) performance did not decrease, it even enjoyed a slight growth from average 38% student
received A or B score (pre-Covid) to average 48% (in Covid). This direction was in line with
the observation of the majority of the teachers in interviews. However, in the first period, the
proportion of students who failed the exam and assignments (F score) at 11% as highest, the
percentage of students who got F during the second period increased, the highest proportion at
25% belonging to the first course started implementing the new study mode. Although it's not
40
a number representing all master programs, we still should watch out as it shows linkage with
researcher's finding in 2.2., which underlined the situation that “shifting in focus" from offline
study to online learning task may create high pressure for cognitive load and hamper learning
capability.
Regarding group performance, we could see that the overall performance of the group was
better in the first period: It was up to 85% of students received “excellent” (65% A) and “very
good" (20%B) in group work result, and no one failed in group work in a single course. On
the other side of the next period, the total number of A and B was lower, and for the first time
there was up to 10% failed in group work, during the social distancing study period of time.
Failing in group work is a rare situation, normally it relates to dropping out of the group or
couldn't complete any assigned task due to certain subjective reasons of the students. Even
though 10 percent may not be considered a statistically significant increase, there is a potential
alert to students' struggle in group work, which was mentioned in their interviews.
(1) Engagement level
Despite attempts of the teachers by testing various digital methods to engage with the students,
together with the effort of the learners to try adapting with the new learning environment, all
cases admitted that digital solutions could not replace and fulfill the dynamics of an on campus
classroom. At the same time, a lot of recognition for digital solutions that help increasing
interaction and engagement are recommended, and “break out room" of Zoom has been
mentioned most frequently by all stakeholders.
The feature is still a controversial topic, though its function is favored by teachers who always
try to stimulate entrepreneurial discussion and coaching with each group of students, using the
tool to replace their familiar action of walking around the classroom, observing and resolving
concerns for students. Several teachers praised it in the context of digital adoption, but they
encounter the obstacle of not being able to observe all of the students at once, to proactively
approach and to encourage them raising concerns, some students group even had the reaction
of nether willing to discuss nor speaking in the group when the teacher started joining their
break out room. On the other side, there are teachers who believed they could have closer
monitoring the progress of group discussion, and could coach each group of students more
dedicatedly than offline classrooms, by visiting all breakout rooms often enough to build the
awareness and perception among the students about the continuous presence of the teacher, so
that students would perceive the teachers would be almost always there to support and answer
concerns.
Another observation was, it seemed more difficult to stimulate students who started their
Master program of Entrepreneurship in Autumn 2020 with 100% online interaction since the
beginning, who they have never met face to face, compared to students enrolled one year earlier
who at least had their almost first year study on campus. For example, although the teachers
always have students turn the camera on for better interaction, “we however can not force them
to do so, we are just able to recommend and we still see some black box of avatar on the screen.”
said Teacher 10.
“There are always 3 groups of students regardless of whether it is offline or online study:
passive - assertive (ask questions in advance of the session) - active (to participate in class),
41
but we need to say that the number of passive students have increased in digital set up. I
understand the situation of students who may be living in small physical rooms with few
interactions in a day. We feel students are disappointed, the teacher shared the disappointment,
but the teacher can just encourage, it’s their choice to overcome this disappointment to study
more energetically", said Teacher 2. In addition, he suggested that the engagement should not
only come from the educators, but also the learners who should be self motivated, recharged
their own energy to encounter the lockdown and social distancing circumstances, by having
healthy routine such as biking, jogging… in an allowed timeslot and distance with others.
Another perspective about engagement between teachers themselves, some teachers believe
remote teaching during the pandemic sometimes makes them feel lonely and unmotivated
because of lacking socialization among teachers as colleagues.
“Sometimes it's easier to feel lonely and demotivate, because no colleague is around to share
pleasure and pain", said Teacher 4. Talking to friends and families virtually with camera turned
on, setting daily checklists and exercising regularly are some “tips" among teachers to increase
their own engagement and energy to deal with the situation.
(2) Abilities and skills gain
All of the teachers admitted that the pandemic and the unplanned change have “forced” the
educators as well as academia to digitalize the whole system in a largest scale ever with the
shortest timing, which was previously supposed to take years to achieve. Consequently, the
confidence and experience of implementing such kind of “emergency remote teaching” are
great legacies that Covid-19 has contributed to the academy as along the process, they have
been testing and adopting different types of digital tools to improve the effectiveness of EE.
Furthermore, the practical operation of lecturing and communicating in an online environment
is also another gain of the teachers during this special period of time. The reason is that, to run
an interactive class remotely, the lecture' structures, activities' step by step instruction, the
technical execution needs to be prepared and even rehearsed carefully, to deliver lectures
effectively and to guide students participating in different injected activities properly, so as to
achieve expected effect in each class.
The collective learnings during the process of conducting lectures in digital also help the
Entrepreneurship educators to reflect their way of approach, and foster more innovative and
effective teaching methods to replace the previous familiar practice when resuming to offline
classroom.
(3) Efficiency
Since the transition happened so quickly with a short amount of time for teachers to prepare in
advance, for the Entrepreneurship teachers, they didn’t have better efficiency because these
first digital courses even required more time to brainstorm, arrange, prepare various ways of
lecturing. However in the long term, these educational materials during digital adoption in the
pandemic will continue being used even when they can go back to campus.
“I have spent a lot of time and effort developing new lectures, why would I go back to use
previous version even when Covid-19 is well controlled and we can teach on campus?” said
Teacher 3.
42
While the interviewed educators shared about various approaches to deliver as
entrepreneurially practical lectures as much as they could for the learners, there are several
criticisms with the existing reality from some colleagues who basically just did exactly what
they had done in offline class: “some people just transfer the powerpoint, and just talk. You
can hear their voice and see their slides”, said by an interviewee. So for these types of lectures,
maybe the efficiency for the teacher is there, but the learning experience created for the students
is a key concern from the other interviewed educator: “They are not utilizing technology and
can do better for students’ learning experience. Even when I go from one classroom to another
classroom, I need to make some changes for my materials, not because of digital, but because
I want to try better and to make sure it adapts to the students I will teach", said Teacher 4.
The other aspect of efficiency brought by the digital teaching was that, due to much lower
capacity of campus, venues such as classroom, library, etc. were not occupied fully as
previously, in the economic aspect, the universities could save administrative and operation
costs on campus versus. Tackling this advantage, several teachers suggest university should
consider improvement in technical support for better quality of broadcasting or pre-recording
lectures, so that they can be more concentrating on interacting, discussing with students in
online classroom, provided that students would receive interesting videos or audios in advance
of lecture time: “One of the thing lacking is proper record environment, especially with course
entrepreneurial element, sharing the vision, broadcast… can always be improved, pre-
recording would be nicer with the support of quiet recording space, and further editing the
video after all to make it more interesting for the students", said Teacher 5.
Furthermore, digital adoption in EE has enabled the teachers to think of more possibilities to
be applied in the near future. Everyone expects to resume an on campus base of teaching,
however the interviewed teachers in Sweden and Netherland shared their expectation of a
hybrid mode set up, which is believed to offer a more flexibility and efficiency for both learners
and educators, and inheriting the legacy built in Covid-19 period. One of the benefit would be
inviting international guest speakers for workshops: “Since everyone now has been much more
open to have a video call, video meeting and online event via Zoom, so it will be possible to
invite international guest speakers to join the workshop or to deliver practical lecture for the
students, without the worries of traveling arrangement”, said Teacher 6.
In addition, for the teachers themselves, they will be able to join a research conference which
may happen in another location far from the campus, and still not stop them from conducting
lectures which may be held only 30 minute after the conference.
4.4.2. Impact of digital adoption in EE
(1) Result:
Students have different reflections from the result they’ve gained after experiencing the shift
of digitalization in their Entrepreneurship learning experience. Some students feel that the
overall result was not impacted negatively; vice versa, other learners realize their study was
affected by Covid-19 and digital adoption.
The former group of students gained even better score in some courses during Covid-19, driven
by the change of exam format. They appreciated and preferred the question type that really
tests how they understand the knowledge, or to test how they apply knowledge into practice
43
systematically, instead of testing their memory with certain theory as before in offline exam,
because they do feel they learn much more during the process of structuring all thinking and
knowledge they gained, then analytically answer the synthetic questions. This insight properly
help to explain the slight increase of “A" and “B" in individual exam result in Figure 9 of the
previous session (4.4.1)
The latter group of learners recognized they encountered more obstacles in doing exam online:
Some complained about the constraint timing that they were given to not only upload their
answer sheet or report, but also required to upload the pictures of notes in their own draft papers
which cost an amount of their limited exam duration. Some students felt less stress for a stay
home exam, but encountered difficulties in being distracted and hard to concentrate at home
compared with the exam hall environment, which they still didn't know how to deal with and
felt that it had certain affect on their assignment performance during the pandemic.
Group work was an aspect being highlighted by almost all interviewees who couldnot meet
their peers face to face, which was described as a “suffering” process:
“Everything related to the group, to connect to people online doesn’t work well”, said Student
8.
“It's not really like ‘discussion' when it’s online, when you are face to face, you can observe
and know who intends to say or have no idea, so you can actively contribute your thoughts, but
when meeting online, you need to wait one by one to really complete their sentences", said
Student 4.
(1) Motivation:
As accentuated in the literature review' session of CLT implication, motivation is a critical
dimension affecting learning success. This aspect seems to be impacted obviously during the
pandemic.
Swedish Board of Student Finance (CSN) is the government agency that manages Swedish
student finance such as grants and loans for studies. According to their report in December
2020, “students feel worse in the wake of the pandemic”. In October 2020, approximately 3,500
students with study grants answered CSN's questions about their health status, the proportion
of students who state that they feel ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ has increased, from 5 percent to 14
percent during the corresponding period. The report also stated that students feel worse than
the general population. “The ongoing pandemic is one of several reasons why health is
perceived as worse. The programme's structure has been changed to distance studies. This has
led to reduced social contacts between the students and has created a deep feeling of isolation
and loneliness”, said by Carl-Johan Stolt, investigator at CSN. The experience of various
problems is still high in the student group. 78 percent of the students who responded to the
survey state that they experience fatigue. 70 percent experience anxiety, worry or demotivation.
Among those who answered here, approximately every fifth student states that the problems
are severe.
These negative feelings seem to be a mutual situation of other students outside of Sweden too.
“I wouldn't say lower motivation, but would say it feels like much more. For instance, normally
I would be easily able to study for 16 hours, but now it's impossible anymore. At the end of the
day I can not study full day. For example, after 8 o'clock I really need to quit, I can't do it
anymore. Normally when I'm in university, after dinner I can continue, but now I can’t go with
the whole stress… maybe because of watching laptop all day long!” said Student 2.
44
Although all the interviewees appreciated the effort and clear communications from the
universities and the teachers to try organizing classes as effectively as possible for the students.
It's hard for them to feel as motivated as they used to be on campus.
“Learning is not just about the activity of being taught, it's also about listening to others
questions, debates, discussion, it's about talk to teachers and classmates during the break when
good ideas actually easier to pop up during these moments, it's also about enjoying facilities of
group work venue, library’s books and services, or occasionally having cup of coffee with
friends after class. These minor accumulated activities sound simple but it builds up the fun of
studying for the students, together with chances to build like-minded networks and motivation
to learn: you learn from lectures, from teachers, and from classmates… But now you enjoyed
it less than before! More “student life” before Corona… I’m glad that the courses are over. The
fun part of studying is no more. I just do everything for graduating”, said Student 12.
(2) Abilities and skills gained
Undoubtedly, digital adoption has built up for students additional skills that they believe will
benefit their future career, such as organizing an online workshop, running a digitally
interactive meeting, and so on. But how about the skills gained that are directly related to their
major of study? Specifically for entrepreneurship learning, in general, the students believed
that they were quite well equipped with good knowledge ‘about’ entrepreneurship.
“My first expectation was they would teach me how to be an entrepreneur, how you take an
idea from 1 stage into reality, now I've created another mindset that I see opportunity that
previously I didn't, I'm provided tools and methods to validate certain insight and idea", said
Student 11.
Notably, it's just one aspect among their objectives of studying this program. Practical
entrepreneurial project involvement, as well as networking are another critical aspects set on
the beginning.
Regarding the practicality, the students appreciated the experience of playing multiple roles,
either accessing - analysing a new venture, being a start-up project leader, and working for an
entrepreneurial firm or team. However, some students who aim to be new venture founders
shared their wish of having less proportion of the first activity, which is to access and to
analyze, their preference is more on the latters, in which they can really build up, or work on a
real project and more importantly, to see if there is actual progress they have brought to the
business. It also means that they would prefer to have more practical interaction with a start-
up already founded than the one in ideation stage, or the one is well established corporate. And
as the nature of a business school student, they tend to be attracted more and feel more
motivated with the start-up solutions that relate to consumers and their real life activities, than
the scientific based innovation serving business to business sector, or government sector.
Furthermore, the content quality of these courses, including way of delivering and facilitating
the learning process, is not equally well recognized by the students:
“The courses are fairly good, the majority of offline courses are more helpful than online but
still meet my objective. Not necessarily anyone did anything wrong, but the part of discussing
and interacting are just different vibes, general dynamics wasn't there in online classes”, said
Student 9.
45
“There were a lot of courses online, one tried in this way, one tried in that way, there are
different kinds, and frankly they all just weren’t great, and I’m not sure if there is much to gain.
I think it’s just about getting through it”, said Student 10.
Another essential aspect that is among the objectives of the students was not fulfilled: Build a
good network with peers, and with successful entrepreneurs.
“The disadvantages, the fact that no social interaction, no networking, no discussion in general,
a good discussion of business ideas between classmates is to find people being trusted, but it
didn't happen when we just studied and worked together online." said Student 10.
“Master degree, especially in Entrepreneurship is to know people, but it doen't happen like that
online! How do you make a good group with people you only see on Zoom!” said Student 5.
“My expectation was to get knowledge of how to found a business… to meet like-minded
people… the one that is affected the most by Corona is networking, to get really in touch with
stakeholders of start-ups, and these all work really well until Corona... I met a lot of people.
Due to Corona, gathering and some get to know sessions got very limited.” said Student 12.
Furthermore, since the digital set up replaced too much interactions and dynamics of on campus
classroom, there were students who expected to sharpen more verbal interaction skills by
assignments, for example, instead of having many essays and business plan reports in written
form, a one-one Question and Answer type of assignment to let student express their
understanding and receive feedback about their learnings towards certain entrepreneurial
theory would help the learn really own the knowledge more interactively; other students
suggest university and the teachers should have offline setup for thesis project’ supervision
session to be able to discuss face to face with the supervisor, at the same time learning from
his or her feedback to other thesis projects. In addition, Student 9 considered such sudden
change in his EE as a real-life lesson about how people deal with ambiguities, which is one of
typical characteristics of an entrepreneur's life. In his view, humans can't deny responsibility
nor involvement in the pandemic and any potential disaster in the future. Therefore, he expects
to be equipped more knowledge related to this matter, such as having a course, or at least a
class in EE program related to responsible entrepreneurship, to drive awareness and
responsibility of the prospective entrepreneurs like him, inspire all of them to build new
ventures with sustainability and responsible innovation, to try to avoid another disaster in the
future, or to aware how should entrepreneurs better contribute and to deal with those
unexpected shock.
(3) Efficiency
During the pandemic, the number of new digital applications being adopted increased
significantly and contributed many footprints in students' daily life. They use applications to
attend online classes, to meet friends for group work, to submit their assignments, also, to mark
project progress, and to arrange meeting schedules that are synchronized across their devices.
However, overall, students don't think that their efficiency improved with digital adoption, nor
have more time on self study; Actually, the only benefit they get was to save time and effort
for transportation back and forth, between school and home; and the additional time they earned
is not for more studying, but for relaxation, or for their own start-up projects. Some students
even felt less efficiency due to overusing the digital applications.
46
“It seemed that we tried to manage our work and schedule tightly and look effectively with
different applications, but actually we are spending more time on using those tools, and not
earning any efficiency”, said Student 1.
“You just instantly login a minute before class and lockout a minute after, so you can plan more
for your time, or you have more time in a day basically. So, I would say there is the possibility
to do more on a daily basis, but to say that if it really improves the study experience? No!” said
Student 9.
Apparently, there is another aspect to understanding a practical “self-efficiency” of the
learners: For some students who are working in parallel with studying, the digital mode helps
them to have more time on their individual work, which meet their own satisfaction.
“If it's not Covid, I wouldn't have such flexibility to be able to work as I am now as I work
almost full day", said Student 10.
While some students don't like the format of having a long pre-recording session since it even
reduced more interaction element, which was negatively being missed during the pandemic,
other students “like” this kind of session in the sense that they can speed up the video to be
faster (such as viewing with 1.5 time faster) to “save more time from boring sessions":
“There are lectures with plenty of slides, with black texts so boring, others are better with more
interaction. But nevertheless, I think we were just not made to watch lectures on the screen for
1.5hour or longer”, said Student 8.
Thinking of the near future, assuming everyone can go back to campus without restriction,
students suggest a hybrid mode of study to maintain the flexibility and efficiency they have
experienced since the remote study mode was applied. Many interviewees have the idea of
categorizing lectures into “transferring information session” and “interactive session", in which
the former session offers choices of either face to face or online, and save mandatory offline
classes for the latter sessions that really need group discussion, and have interactive activities
to stimulate entrepreneurial contexts.
In short, the impacts of digital adoption in EE during Covid-19 period of time is varied, which
can be summarized in table below:
Impacts of
digital
adoption
Teachers' perspective Student perspective
Result Overall, there is no significant change.
Actual result from a case reminded
possibly of higher pressure in cognitive
load when “shifting in focus” from
offline to online, and potential alert for
students' struggle in group work during
Covid-19.
Different reflections: Some perceived
unchanged, even slightly increase in
individual, driven by the changes in
exam question type; Some felt
negatively impacted, didn't know how to
concentrate.
All perceived digital group work is
challenging.
Engagement Applies different digital features to Statistically (CSN) and emotionally,
47
/ Motivation engage and to connect with the students.
Some teachers found it hard to observe
and to coach students online, especially
harder to engage and to motivate
students who have never met face to
face.
many students are unmotivated or
experiencing fatigue, due to the lack of
social interaction, and the “fun of study".
Ability and
skills gained
Various learnings in teaching
entrepreneurship courses digitally and
interactively, especially about
systematically structured online, together
with self reflection about previous on
campus ways of teaching and rooms for
improvements.
Learned ‘about’ entrepreneurship
knowledge, but didn't meet expectations
about building a network with peers and
successful start-up founders.
Expect to be involved more with start-up
projects, have more dynamics and
interactions during courses and ways of
exams to better “own” entrepreneurial
skills, and suggest having classes related
to responsible entrepreneurship.
Efficiency In the short term, teachers tend to spend
more time on preparing digital lectures,
but in the long term these materials can
be efficient to re-use them in future
classes.
In campus operation view, the digital
study mode help saving operation cost.
Teacher suggest to better equip facilities
to produce more interesting pre-
recording materials for students.
Potential direction for post Covid-19:
inviting international guest speakers
joining entrepreneurship workshops,
operating in hybrid mode to help both
teachers and students be more flexible
and efficient in organizing and attending
lectures.
Time saving from transportation doesn't
help students to improve efficiency as
some of them can't study as long hours
as they did previously on campus, or
others tend to have the additional time
for their own business but study.
Views towards post Covid-19 study
mode: support for hybrid study in which
offers choices to attend “transferring
information session” offline or online,
and save mandatory face to face classes
for “interactive session”.
Table 4: Summary of Impacts of digital adoption in EE during Covid-19 in the perspectives of
both teachers and students
5. Analysis
This chapter presents an analysis from empirical findings, taking the reader through a journey
of realization and lessons learnt from the process of digital adoption in Entrepreneurship
education. The key contributors of findings and recommendation in this thesis will majorly
depend on thematic analysis throughout qualitative interviews, which are performed by
matching between concepts into specific themes across the cases, on the basis of theory,
research questions, empirical outputs; Codes are generated by observing and recognizing their
pattern and frequency from the answers recorded in transcripts which also reflected and
summarized in previous part with OHWI framework, then to clustering them into 9 Themes
collecting key findings from similarities and differences in digital adoption in EE from various
48
cases, based on that reflecting in Analysis Outcome to suggest lessons learnt from the impact
of the Covid-19 on digital adoption in EE. Firstly, it discusses about ‘more attention and
assistance to teachers than students in digital transition - adaptation and students’ unsolved
obstacles in the learning process’ (marked [A] in figure 11); furthermore, ‘unmet need of
students in Entrepreneurship studying objectives, potentially due to constructive misalignment'
is raised (marked [B] in figure 11); next, to help students solve the obstacles as well as fulfilling
unmet need, it is learnt that ‘say interacting, engaging entrepreneurially regardless of teaching
mode’ is essential but also brings with ‘challenges for the teacher' (marked [C] in figure 11);
Thinking ahead for what may happen after the pandemic, it highlights mutual suggestion from
the key findings with ‘strong intention and interest in hybrid mode of study for post Covid-19’,
however it's critical to understand that it is ‘driven by different insights’ with may affect the
quality, or even original objective of EE (mark [D] in figure 11); Finally, a general learning
from how higher education institutes have been dealing with such kind of ‘shock' as Corona is
worthen reminded in ‘Lesson in effective communication towards organization in unplanned
change transition and adaptation’ (mark [E] in figure 11); the author analysis path will be
reminded in figure 11. Further learnings draw into recommendation will be suggested in
section 7.
Figure 11: Analysis overview. show each step in the analysis from Code to Theme and
Analysis Outcome.
49
5.1. More attention and assistance to teachers than students in digital transition -
adaptation and students’ unsolved obstacles in the learning process:
Obviously, the academy, especially the teachers, play a critical role in making sure the
transition for the first time to either 100% digital (for 5 master programs in Netherland and
Sweden) or hybrid mode (for the case of NUS) happens smoothly regardless their own
background in technology capability, and ensuring students can still continue pursuing the
program during the time of Covid-19 outbreak. To achieve this additional sudden objective
with 2-week window time of implementation, which was a hard pressure to the academy, the
teachers have received various support which can be divided into 2 aspects: Technical user
manual of relevant digital platforms and applications via instruction materials and tutoring
sessions, and the way to teach remotely effectively via official instruction sessions, peer to peer
assist campaign, and best practice sharing, etc. Relatively, the students also received
notifications and instructions materials to address only the first aspect: how to use those digital
tools technically. Among all of the interviews, students appreciated the load of technical
materials from the university, but actually the one they really have a detailed reading is only
about how to embed school accounts in the tools, as other basic functions such as how to call,
set meetings online, screen sharing and so on, are already familiar enough. While ‘education’
itself requires the involvement from both parties: teacher, and learner, the process of adopting
digital and providing support from the university shows clearly high intention for the teachers
not only in technical aspect but more importantly, in the aspect of “how to teach" as this was
the first time such kind of timely transition happen. But looking at the view of a learner, it
seems that they didn't gain relative assistance in “how to learn" effectively, and remotely,
though this was also an experience of learning they had never encountered before. In addition,
as researchers highlighted previously, this type of transition generates extremely high
“cognitive load” hence hampering learning capability of the students, the support related to
‘how to learn” support is extremely important within the context of entrepreneurship education,
in which the challenge has been underlined are its nature of “practical and real life examples"
(Ratten, 2020) and the need of integrating activities and interactions during the theoretical
courses or practical projects to deliver education objectives. Consequently, there were many
sharing from the interviewees stating similar obstacles: challenging in group work discussion
and brainstorming, hard to concentrate, lack of interaction, low motivation while these
dimensions were proven to be correlated to mental effort and learning success as indicated in
chapter 2. In other words, the students need more help to organize their learning activities more
effectively to reduce the situation of being unmotivated, fatigue and inefficient group work.
5.2. Unmet need of students in Entrepreneurship studying objectives, potentially due
to constructive misalignment.
First of all, it’s worth reminding that generally, both teachers and students believe that they
have achieved the educational objectives of their Entrepreneurship programs, especially all of
the students well recognized that the course structures had helped them to equip
entrepreneurship knowledge. However, when conducting the interviews and reaching the end
of the session by asking students to summarize positive and negative impacts brought to their
education by Coronavirus, a lot of answers were in the “structure” that the knowledge transfer
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part was good but the socialization and especially networking parts were suffering. It suggests
the author to do a dissection and qualitatively connect the alignment between objectives of
educators and learners, and between ‘Course objectives’ - ‘teaching - learning activities', and
‘assessment tasks’, based on constructive alignment concepted researched by Biggs (1999),
presented in literature review chapter, in combination with empirical findings in previous
chapter:
Figure 12: Summary of teachers and students' objectives towards Entrepreneurship education
In figure 12, the author summarize from the answers in interviews and captured in empirical
findings of teachers and students towards Entrepreneurship Education, the vertical axis shows
the importance of an objective, as well as the frequency of reflecting such objective into
courses, teaching activities and assessment tasks, the top box position indicates that objective
is reflected the most among the teachers and students of different universities, and is most
expected by the students. Vice versa, the bottom box means it is reflected with lower frequency
by teachers, or with lower expectation by students (without the meaning to ignore it). Namely,
the similarity of 2 columns is that both teacher and students mentioned their objective of
“educate through" or “learn through" entrepreneurship, in which the teachers put great effort
in offering entrepreneurial practical projects involvement and entrepreneurial context
stimulations. In the perspective of both types of students who (i) determined to found new
venture, or (ii) learned to demonstrate entrepreneurship in organizations, they all shared the
expectation of learning through entrepreneurship, especially their need of socializing with
peers, who are like-minded people as future entrepreneurs, and furthermore, they expect to get
involve in real entrepreneurial firms to apply their knowledge in a ‘real assignment’.
The main difference between the two is that many Entrepreneurship programs prioritize more
for educating ‘about’ entrepreneurship with the expectation of equipping students’ knowledge
to form business decision or to drive entrepreneurial process, this objective and the relevant
courses set up have higher proportion compared to ‘educate for entrepreneurship’; as to the
teachers, the latter objective will be reflected in different ways: a guest speaker seminars, in a
student led entrepreneurial project happen in between the program, by the end of the program,
or for some universities they will have funding for most potential projects afterwards, another
universities promises to provide exposure to their alumni network of entrepreneurship program
after the graduation and so on. However, in the view of the students, they do prioritize more
for ‘learning for entrepreneurship’ to happen more within their learning process. Regardless of
whether they aim to be or not to be a new venture founder, all of the learners indicate their
strong wish of interacting with successful start-ups founders and entrepreneurs right in the
learning process, before they graduate. Most of them are not satisfied with this objective yet
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because of several reasons: Due to social distancing, they themselves couldn't attend
entrepreneurship workshops, venture challenge competitions, nor networking events organized
in the region as it used to have before the outbreak, so higher expectation is put for their
entrepreneurship program in business school. Some universities offer the chance to work on
entrepreneurial project but with incubators whose firms are in ideation stage or before proving
product market fit and not yet able to scale up, other courses provide the chance of meeting
guest speakers online without the possibilities of mingling or casual catch up between break
time as on campus set up. Conclusively the chance of meeting start-up founders who have built
their firm from scratch to success rarely happens, while this type of guest speaker and their
firms' projects are among highest interest of students to ‘learn for entrepreneurship’. Notably,
the students didn't reject but show appreciation to engage with incubators, accessing their
business models or contributing in forming their business strategy, it's just about their strongest
demand of learning from successful examples by meeting, building network with successful
founders, entrepreneurs seem not being prioritized during their program, leading to a point of
unmet need when reviewing the program as a whole. To sum up, there is a misalignment
between teachers and students regarding their own view on the importance of EE objective
(educate or learn ‘for’ entrepreneurship) and the frequency of its relevant lectures and activities
assigned for students.
5.3. Stay interacting, engaging entrepreneurially regardless of teaching mode, and
challenges for the teachers.
“Stay interacting and engaging", this seems not a new thing and even repeated quite several
times in this thesis, as we all know that it's essential to EE given its nature of “higher attention
to the hands - on practical aspects of business” as mentioned in the literature review chapter”.
Nevertheless, almost all interviewees still accentuate the lack of this factor in their learning
experience during the pandemic.
There are teachers who have adopted various digital tools such as having students to watch a
short video clips or to read relevant materials before class; then to warm up their sessions by
opening questions in Mentimeter and inviting students to answer; during the lecture, they tried
different mode of conveying either through voice (speaking), short text, image, video clips
(image and sounds) and having quick quiz to help students recall the knowledge, etc. There are
also teachers who transfer the “more lecturing” type in offline class into “more coaching” type
in digital session, and coach students more dedicatedly; or having students run workshops for
the class on their own before providing feedback. These are among “best digital classes"
experiences recognized by the students. These all efforts are able to motivate students to
engage, and to bring more excitement during their learning process. In other words of Cognitive
load theory, the diverse methods of conveying the messages from the lectures help to avoid
overload in limited capacity of working memory, and the minor exercise or quizzes are also
ways of simplifying study tasks while constructing schema to build the ‘new knowledge’ into
‘long term memory’, and these quick assessment also help the teachers themselves to quickly
evaluate and improve instructional materials and methods by observing the level of knowledge
absorptance among their students. In these cases, the teachers have restructured their lecture
slides with more clear structure and process to guide and engage with students step by step
during their sessions.
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While the above examples are the bright sides and show strong attempt of entrepreneurship
educators, a number of “boring lectures" which are “teacher talks - I listen" remain occuring,
this phenomenon actually is not really due to the situation of Covid-19, but may remind the
educators to review even their on-campus teaching method, investigate whether it is effective
or not to the learners.
On the other hands, some educators also shared their own obstacles in monitoring the
techniques without able to observe the reaction and body languages of the students to offer in
time coaching as in face to face situations, on top of that is the situation that not every teachers
have wide enough spaces to have all of the facilities such as multi-screen to observe students
while presenting the lectures, quite enough environment for perfect pre-recording, etc but
limited “education world" inside a a 12 - 13 inch of laptop screen.
Let's comparing these situations occurred due to digital set up and previous on campus teaching
mode:
(i) In face to face environment, the teachers have all facilities ready (white boards, flip charts,
projectors with multiple screens, computer’s or hall’ speakers), their focus are more about
preparing the lecture adapting to each class, assign pre-reading materials, observe the body
language of the students while lecturing to timely adjust the speed, or to motivate students
raising concerns, and walk around the classroom to monitor group work progress and provide
coaching.
(ii) In digital adoption set up, the focus mentioned above remains the same but dividing
breakout rooms and “walking” around to observe and to coach instead of walking in the
classroom and being able to observe full body languages. Furthermore, in most of the case
(except NUS), the teachers need to handle by themselves all of the assisting facilities for remote
teaching: Open Zoom as the key mandatory applications, presenting their file online in full
screen, monitoring their chat box or interaction among participants list to know whether there
is written or spoken questions students want to raise, are the key actions they need to take to
run an online class, not including further interacting ways of delivering contents, such as embed
video clip in the slides (which was often error or lagging during the presentation depending on
the network of teachers and students), having additional quizzes as mentioned in above best
practice.
The quick comparison above indicates the challenge of additional multi-tasking for the
teachers, which creates pressure and may affect their key focus meant to be: lecturing and
interacting with the students, as among the interviewed cases, only NUS professors have
teaching assistant to help them dealing with technical operations in virtual lecturer, for the rest
it's mainly the teacher who takes care the whole process.
The challenge of conducting an effective digital lecture indicated by some teachers suggest two
potential directions for the university to resolve the issues:
(i) Mentioned by the teacher themselves, given the decrease of campus operation, the university
may assist by allocating technical classrooms exclusively serving the purpose of conducting
digital lectures, as many teachers don't have enough space for multi-devices or a quiet enough
environment for recording. The technical room should be well equipped facilities for audio,
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video recording, broadcast, and conducting lecture in livestream mode, together with video
edition assist.
(ii) Learning from the arrangement from NUS, having a teaching assistant to support teachers
with technical aspects of organizing a virtual class is essential, the teachers can therefore
concentrate and optimize interaction with students.
On the other hand, it worth reminding that an effective lecture needs both educators and
learners to interplay. Both stakeholders should together the lack of interacting and engaging
sometimes are not purely because teachers who are still reluctant to change, to adopt digital
solutions efficiently, or because the teachers encounter the pressure of additional multi-tasking,
but also partially because some students who are not really willing to engage, such as working
in offices in parallel with their studying, or feel not motivated enough to turn on video camera
to let teachers observe them. Other students who are highly dedicated to the study keep
emphasizing their suggestion in the interview: “Keep interacting, ask us to turn on camera,
don't ask questions to everyone but ask someone specifically, it will help us to be more focused
and can interact with more classmates”.
5.4. Strong intention and interest in hybrid mode of study for post Covid-19 but driven
by different insights.
As captured in empirical findings, the majority of both educators and learners shared that
Covid-19 has changed their previous perception about the possibility of EE in many aspects.
Everyone expects to be able to go back to campus, however most of them show their strong
belief in the development of digital solutions to adopt in teaching entrepreneurship, and don't
expect to get back to 100% on campus teaching and studying as it used to be, before the
pandemic. Emerging terms to categorize sessions in Entrepreneurship programs have been
created by the interviewees: ‘knowledge or information transfer’ session, and ‘interactive
needed' session.
For the teachers, ‘knowledge transfer' sessions mainly refer to the session that needs a big hall
to gather a large number of students in learning a certain theory with low level of interaction
needed. In contrast, the ‘interactive needed' session is clearly referring to the classes that
involve deep discussion, interaction and practice related to developing entrepreneurial and
business skills overall. Their suggestion is to have the former sessions happen online lively, or
flexible time for self-learning for the students, and to have latter classes happen on campus,
face to face. By transferring to this kind of hybrid mode later on, the teachers also can leverage
the legacy they have built during the pandemic, and be more productive in participating in a
research conference and followed by a digital teaching for their students.
Similarly, the students have quite the same expectation for the hybrid study mode with above
2 categories. However, they have additional insights to classify the first type of session, even
some of them called it ‘information transfer’ sessions. The reason is rooted from “unsolved
obstacles" and “boring classes" mentioned above in 5.1. and 5.3, in their views, the first type
indicates some pre-recording lectures with a long monotone presentation last more than 1 hour,
or the online livestream sessions where the teachers don't focus on interact with students,
instead more on “transferring information" of the new theory without validating the
understanding of the students, to help them make it become “knowledge". Given these sessions
are presented without engaging and discussing, the students therefore expect those sessions to
54
happen online to save more time from transportation, and to self-manage their study time more
efficiently. Besides, this study mode also “helps" part of students to work more on their
business or job outside of the school.
The similarity of both stakeholders’ views indicates that it's time for the higher education
system to really self-access should there be any change in the study mode post Covid-19 to
meet the expectations from both educators and learners. The difference in above insights
remind us of potential risks may occur when transferring to hybrid mode:
(i) Abusing ‘knowledge transfer’ sessions too often: While “flexibility” and “efficiency" may
become reasons to operate this type of sessions online, the relevant concern is how to manage
and cross check if the decision of teaching mode of specific lectures prioritizes to achieve the
expected quality of EE which should demonstrate its nature of “theory – practice emphasis”,
or mistakenly putting flexibility in higher priority?
(ii) Indirectly “motivating" part of students to work more during their education, leading to
lower focus on main objectives: As some students mentioned that they have been working
much more during the pandemic due to digital setup, they can continue this way of working -
studying, while the original setup is supposed to be a full-time dedicated learning process to
achieve quality education.
(iii) Overlooking the learners' cognitive load: Given the need of ‘emergency remote teaching’
during Covid-19, each entrepreneurship programs were given the autonomy to organize their
classes in the methods they preferred, which motivate the teachers to adopt various way of
teaching, and try to improve continuously to conduct effective sessions for the students.
However, as presented in the above chapter, there are still classes that are considered ineffective
by both students and teachers, and students experienced multiple obstacles of unmotivating,
being hard to concentrate, or too tired to self-study after several online lectures, etc. The
potential reason can be overlooking cognitive load implication when designing courses for
students within a course structure, and within a program total view.
By analysing potential risks and connecting with EE’s nature and CLT implications in literature
review, the aim of the author is not to disagree with hybrid mode suggestion from the
interviewees, but to underline the need of careful consideration and well planning if making
the decision of shifting to a new teaching mode, to ensure the objective of EE can be met, and
the nature of EE can be demonstrated effectively within the new program structure.
5.5. Lesson in effective communication towards organization in unplanned change
transition and adaptation.
This finding is not specialized for entrepreneurship education but for the academy in general.
Although there are certain unmet needs from the students as well as additional pressures
occurred for both teachers and learners, the appreciation shown by all interviewees in the way
the universities have handled this unplanned change indicate that it is worth drawing a key
“successful factor" during the process of the transition. Firstly, it's about being open and
transparent to update the change or potential change, even if there is not yet a decision made
but timeline to expect it; Secondly, quickly adopting an user friendly solution to acquire huge
amount of users, and to be easier for the steps of instruction and technical support; Thirdly,
making decision with certain autonomy and additional support for the stakeholders who play
critical part in running the actual practice, in this case is the teachers and programs coordinators
of Entrepreneurship programs to decide their own ways of lecturing and assignments with the
55
assist of digital solutions and relevant instructions. These accumulated actions will let the
relevant stakeholders (especially the teachers) feel less pressured but more motivated and
confident to handle these unplanned changes, and increase the sympathy way of approaching
all stakeholders to encounter the negative effect that occurred during the sudden shock, and to
boost faster peace of learning and improving on the way. In this context, the evidence is the
legacy of additional skills gained dramatically, especially the teachers, with digitalisations and
reflections in the way of conducting effective lectures, as shared by all of the interviewed
educators.
6. Conclusion
6.1. Summary of research questions
This study aims to investigate ‘what’ and ‘how’ the digital solutions have been adopted in
Entrepreneurship education during the time of Covid-19, and relevant impacts brought to the
teachers and students in this field, to conduct lessons learnt which may potentially apply for
post Covid-19. Three research questions were developed to seek answers fulfilling the research
purpose.
RQ1: How have digital applications been adopted in Entrepreneurship Education during the
time of Covid-19?
The digital adoptions is considered as “unplanned change" requiring all educators, including
Entrepreneurship educators to quickly transit to either 100% digital mode of study
(Netherland's and Sweden's programs), or hybrid mode of study (NUS program), depending on
the decision at university level, which also tight with the situation of the outbreak and
government regulations that may vary by region. To implement the transitions, timely updates
with clear communication have been sent regularly to all stakeholders, digital applications have
been chosen with the criteria of easy to use, easy to stimulate interactions among teachers and
students. This is the first time in history that the teachers have to transfer to digital and equip
these new skill sets in the shortest duration of 2 weeks. In addition to the effort of constant
learning from all, the teachers were supported by various sessions to deal with technical manual
instruction sessions, as well as getting to know how to teach remotely effectively via official
meeting sessions, peer to peer program, best practice sharing workshops and so on. For the
students, they received instruction materials about digital applications usage, but almost no
students really need all of the usage guide, except the part of synchrony with the school's email
account, due to their familiarity with other communication applications such as Skype,
Messenger, etc.
Among all of the cases, while the universities in Netherland and Sweden decided to go for
100% digital mode from March 2020 to Spring semester 2021, with 1 pilot session of ‘live
stream mode' happened on campus, National University of Singapore (NUS) had different
approach which can be divided into three periods of time: (i) The first period (March 2020 to
end of Spring semester - June 2020): 100% digital teaching for all programs; (ii) The second
period (August 2020 to December 2020): hybrid mode design with virtual and offline class for
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almost all programs, except MSc Venture Creation (Entrepreneurship), its intake was shifting
from August 2020 to January 2021; (iii) The third period (January 2021 to end of Spring
semester 2021): remain hybrid mode but with very few proportion of virtual classroom:
‘knowledge transfer' courses and classes are hold online, ‘entrepreneurial skills development’
occurs on campus but still strictly follow social distancing regulations, by splitting the
entrepreneurship class into smaller groups with different schedules for each group of students
to come to study hall, and the teachers would deliver the same lectures repeatedly to different
groups of attendants. The teachers strongly believe that developing entrepreneurial skills need
to engage students interactively, so as to observe, to train and to coach them in simultaneous
situations. In addition, NUS is also a unique case where the teacher has a teaching assistant to
organize classes, when there is an online set up needed, the teaching assistant would take a key
role in ensuring the smooth application and interaction between teachers and students. While
in other universities, teachers need to handle both teaching and digital facilitation.
On the other hand, during the transition, in most of the cases there are no specific metrics to
monitor the quality of educating entrepreneurship but two common approaches: having online
meetings between student representatives, and course evaluation forms which are anonymous
surveys distributed to students after each course. While the former is much appreciated by the
program coordinators, indicating the importance of close connections with students for
improvements addressing their pain points, the latter encountered the fact that very few students
participate in the surveys, therefore many teachers don't perceive it as a strong recommendation
for program adjustment.
RQ2: In what way do EE's purpose, method, experience and result of teaching and learning
entrepreneurship have been changed under impacts of the digital adoption due to Covid-19?
In general, all stakeholders remained unchanging with their objectives in teaching and learning
Entrepreneurship programs but chose to adapt new modes of lectures and assignment methods.
The objectives cover all categories of EE purpose: educate or learn ‘for', ‘through' (or ‘in') and
‘about’ entrepreneurship, with high attention to “hands on practical aspects of business” as the
key nature of EE, also its main challenge to conduct digitally.
Instead of the familiar face to face study hall wherein teachers and, or guest speakers can
actively observe, interact, coach, invite discussion from students with full facilities in the
classrooms, diverse digital solutions have been adopted in teaching and learning methods, such
as Zoom, Canvas, Mentimeter, Kahoot, Slack, Perusall, etc. They are most popular applications
for different kinds of activities, in which the first two are mandatory tools to adopt for almost
all cases (except NUS use an internal built platform instead of Canvas but with similar
features). While digital study was mandatory for most of the cases, except a few students who
study 1-year master program chose to stay in their home town for remote study, the majority
of the interviewees as students still prioritized having group work as a face to face meeting in
one of the group members' houses.
There are also different ways to approach changing in exam format, for instance, having shorter
duration or additional observing application to avoid cheating, however more preference for
the method of changing the exam questions from ‘more memorizing’ to ‘more understanding
and systematic analysing’.
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Furthermore, teaching methods have been reviewed and improved constantly by the teachers
who are fully aware of the nature of EE and want to conduct as interactive and engaging as
possible with the students. Some educators realized 2-hour sessions seemed not effective
especially with digital set up, therefore having a new approach of “more coaching" instead,
meaning, having the students pre-read short materials in text, or pre-view short video clips on
their own, then offering dedicated coaching for each group to discuss the given topic. Some
teachers tried having quizzes to excite students while checking their understanding towards the
lectures, hence adjusting their contents accordingly. There are also teachers who stimulate
entrepreneurial cases for students to discuss and propose solutions, etc. These ways of approach
and improvements are well aligned with CLT in the aspect of simplifying task for students,
assigning tasks to motivate their engagement, having them to brainstorm on their own solutions
towards the problems and ways of apply the theories, and leading to more easily automate and
construct the ‘schema', turning new information in ‘working memory’ to become knowledge
stored in ‘long term memory'. However, in the view of students, and of some interviewed
educators, there are a number of sessions which remain ‘talk - listen' mode with similar lectures
slide transferring from offline campus to online classroom, resulting in lower or no interactions
and engagement in the sessions, which classified by the students as ‘information transfer'
session, or “worst digital learning experience".
However, overall, the teachers have not recognized significant change in students assignment
results compared to on campus period of time. On the other hand, actual results provided by a
master program reminded possibly of higher pressure in learners' cognitive load when “shifting
in focus” from offline to online, and potential alert for students' struggle in group work during
Covid-19. The learners themselves also admitted that group work is one of the key challenges,
discussing and brainstorming online could not be the same as face to face interaction.
Regarding the students' individual result, some perceived an unchanged in their exam score
compared to offline period of time, there is even a slight increase in some courses’ result, driven
by the changes in question type to “more understanding and analysing”. Contrast, some
students felt their study result was negatively impacted as it was hard for them to concentrate
during online lectures, as well as having exams in their living place instead of the quiet
environment of the study hall. Furthermore, the report of CSN underlined that students felt
worse during the pandemic, compared to previous normal situations, and compared to other
groups of populations. They experienced unmotivating and fatigue, which aligned with their
own sharing in interviews, as a lack of social interaction, and the “fun of study". This situation
may explain why teachers found it harder to engage with the learners, especially with students
who have never met face to face.
Throughout the process of adopting digital solutions to EE, students highly appreciate the
smooth transition of the business school in response to the pandemic, and the entrepreneurship
knowledge they have equipped. Both the teachers and students have put strong effort in this
digital education experience, in which having interactive and entrepreneurially practical
sessions remains a high focus. Consequently, students feel they are well equipped ‘about’
entrepreneurship knowledge, but didn't fully meet expectations in building network with peers
and successful start-up founders, and they expect to be involved more with new venture
projects, have more dynamics, interactions during courses and ways of exams to better “own”
entrepreneurial skills, and suggest to have classes related to responsible entrepreneurship to try
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to avoid another disaster in the future, or to aware how should entrepreneurs better contribute
and to deal with similar unexpected shock to Covid-19.
RQ3: What are the lessons to learn and apply after Covid-19, in the perspective of both
teachers, and students?
During the digital transition, teachers have been put in a hot spot to make it happen hence
receiving high attentions of assistants in how to teach, while students seem lacking guidance
in how to learn, resulting in their unsolved obstacles including challenging in group work
discussion and brainstorming online, hard to concentrate, lack of interaction, low motivation,
etc. In addition, there are unmet needs of lacking socialization and fun in studying, especially
networking with successful entrepreneurs are more prioritized in students’ objective in learning
entrepreneurship than teachers' objective in teaching the major.
While interacting, engaging entrepreneurially is considered critical for EE regardless of
teaching mode, it is a challenge for teachers who need to perform additional multitasking in a
virtual classroom setup, the potential assist suggested to the universities can be allocating
technical classrooms exclusively serving the purpose of conducting digital lectures, or learning
from NUS, having teaching assistant to deal with digital setup, and let the teacher purely focus
on interacting with the learners to offer the best learning experience for the students.
Moving forward, both teachers and students suggest a new hybrid mode in teaching and
learning entrepreneurship. It is agreeable that this new suggestion can inherit legacy of
learnings from Covid-19 digital adoption in EE, and offer flexibility and efficiency for all
stakeholders, however the academy should watch out some potential risks such as: Abusing
online sessions too much to benefit demands that don't contribute positively for EE, indirectly
“motivating" part of students to work more during their education, leading to lower focus on
main objectives, or overlooking the learners' cognitive load that makes students' obstacles
mentioned during Covid-19 remain unsolved.
6.2. Contributions
6.2.1. Theoretical contributions
Given the situation of lacking framework in measuring the impact of EE, especially in
“unplanned change” circumstances, such as rapidly adopting digital solutions in educating
entrepreneurship, the author suggested the ‘OHWI’ framework developed by learning from
previous research mentioned in literature review sessions. The author believes that the
framework can be utilized or developed further in assessing the impacts of Entrepreneurship
education in different contexts, with a more systematic view.
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Figure 13: ‘OHWI' framework to apply in assessing impact of EE
As presented in Figure 13, to assess the impact of EE, we can start by reviewing the Objectives
set of our own EE program during a specific period of time or situation, which named as
‘certain X situation’ in the framework, in comparison with the original objectives of the
program, then followed by detailing How the relevant changes (named as ‘certain Y changes')
has been implemented during that time, and What teaching methods and learning activities
after adopting those emerging solutions, all reflecting in the Impacts brought by adopting them
in EE, separated by teachers and learners for more specific insights. In addition, the framework
does not mean only applying when there is a shock or rapid change in the academy, but is
suggested to serve as a tool to self-assess the alignments between Objective - How - What and
Impact in a potential new program.
6.2.2. Practical contributions:
In relation to lessons learnt in section 5, there are several recommendations for the academy as
well as for the students:
6.2.2.1. For academy: Researching potentiality of hybrid mode study, not to ignore the
objectives and nature of EE, as well as putting in the whole program view to assess
if cognitive load is well optimized for the learners.
Though almost all interviewees indicated that they wished to come back to campus, they
actually suggest a blended mode of teaching and studying. However, as alerted in the previous
Analysis session, there is a risk of abusing this type of set up for individual purpose, instead of
for the best of EE experience. While majority of interviewees are splitting entrepreneurship
courses into ‘knowledge transfer' (or in students view, ‘information transfer only'), and
‘interacting needed' session, and suggesting the latter as online mode, the former as face to face
mode; there are teachers who believed that even with ‘knowledge transfer' type of classes, it is
vital to engage and to understand if students have got right understanding towards a new theory.
Therefore, it would be useful to put all desired teaching mode in each class of all courses in a
holistic view, and the program educators, together with the teachers, objectively apply CLT
and constructive alignment concept to assess if the classes in each period have arrange in the
way of optimizing performance for both educators and the learners.
On the other hand, in the new program, the academy may consider to have some classes related
to the topic of sustainability entrepreneurship and sudden shock management for business,
according to the suggestion of a student who deeply felt that the pandemic and digital transition
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in EE gave him the truest case about how everyone react to such ambiguity, one of
characteristic of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, he strongly believes that the occur of the
pandemic always have certain relation to the human, who may ignore the aspect of
sustainability when building their firms, but the modern and young entrepreneurs should have
better knowledge about the field, so as to build new ventures more sustainably to avoid similar
disaster can happen in the future.
6.2.2.2. For academy: Reviewing objectives and key expectations of the learners towards EE
in order to have some adjustment, potentially on the aspect of more interaction and
real networking opportunities with successful start-up founders during the courses.
As networking is extremely important expectation of Entrepreneurship students, with specific
needs of having chance to mingle and to interact individually or at least in group with the
successful start-up founder, some initial ideas have been developing, such as mentorship
program which connects each student with a senior entrepreneur for their own discussion and
learning opportunities, or new business idea contest which used to be organized in a case prior
to Covid-19 can also provide practical experience and network expansion for the contestants.
Besides, inviting more entrepreneurs to attend as guest speakers, and creating context for the
students to have more chances to engage with them.
6.2.2.3. For both academy and learners: More proactive in search new digital solutions to
resolve obstacles of group work
This recommendation is not rejecting the efforts of all stakeholders, especially the teachers
who have demonstrated their ability to “learn on the fly" to catch up with the new teaching
mode. On the other hand, it is undeniable that there are still both educators and learners found
difficulties in operating digitally, effectively and expect to get back to the campus to regain the
dynamics of EE. However, what if the pandemic unexpectedly prolongs, or what if there is
another disaster? This is not only the concern of the author, but also mentioned by 2
interviewees. Therefore, we shall be more proactive, instead of being reactive in searching and
learning new digital solutions, especially with the obstacle of group work. As the fact that we
are not able to observe students, or teammates' body languages and facial expressions during
the sequential discussion online, there are currently at least 2 solutions that can help us to
reduce this discomfort.
The first is ‘Annotate' feature of Zoom, the widely used application but it seems that very few
interviewees mentioned the benefit of this feature on group brainstorming. After screen sharing
a white board, by clicking “Annotate", and allowing showing videos of all participants, we can
“see" each other's facial expression at least during brainstorming, as well as can utilize different
drawing tools available to build up ideas together. Of course, digital drawing seems not as easy
as writing on a sticky note and putting on the board as in classroom, but without learning to
use it, we can't improve our digital skills to benefit digital group discussion.
61
Figure 14: Zoom's Annotate feature illustration (Codecentric’s website, 2020).
Another application is quite new called Stage, developed by Nuteq, allowing attendants to show
their video while work together on a same or different page as they want, with diverse tools for
drawing and typing.
Figure 15: Illustration of online brainstorm by Stage application (Nuteq’s website, 2021).
62
6.2.2.4. For academy: While saving operation cost from digital study mode or hybrid mode,
invest more in having teaching assistants to let teachers focus thoroughly on their
main mission of delivering lectures effectively and interactively, with high
involvement of entrepreneurial real cases and dedicated coaching for students.
Furthermore, just as how the emergency team with heavy involvement of IT department was
founded during COvid-19 to handle the smooth transition to digital study, the university may
consider to develop a ‘digital learning expert' team, or assign one or some teachers to lead this
process of hybrid mode of teaching EE, in which not only applying their expertise in teaching,
learning, CLT, and digital solutions to equip educators on ‘how to teach' (for the best learning
experience for the students), and also to equip learners on ‘how to learn' efficiently in such new
way of approach.
6.3. Recommendations for future research
In relation to limitations as mentioned above, a longitude study is suggested to monitor if the
number of start-ups were founded from the entrepreneurship programs during the time Covid-
19 would be a great contribution in monitoring the impacts of the pandemic more holistically,
together with increasing the scope of this research from 6 cases in Sweden, Netherlands and
Singapore to larger scale.
6.4. Limitations of the study
Due to the constraint of timing and the situations of only being able to interview 100% online,
the sample size is limited at 21 which may not represent the voice of all entrepreneurship
educators and learners. Besides, the lack of quantitative data due to confidential policy is also
an ambition not yet able to achieve at this stage. In addition, the ‘impact' in OHWI framework
is using indicators suggested in the research of Mwasalwiba (2010) except ‘graduate start-ups’
which required a longitude study method instead of the scope of this master thesis.
63
References
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Appendix
Interview guide - for program coordinator and teacher
Semi-structured interview
Respondent
Name:
University:
Teaching program:
Introduction for the qualitative interview
Length: 45 – 60 minutes.
Goal: To have a conversation, discussion with the focus on your reflection about digital
adoption in entrepreneurship and its relevant impacts on your teaching/studying activities.
Background information
Ice breaking, invite interviewee to briefly introduce about him/herself: general information
and academic background
Ask for consent of audio recording the interview.
1. May you kindly introduce yourself? Like your role in XXX university, especially the
connection to Entrepreneurship education?
Note: If the interviewee agrees, turn on “Voice memo” application and start recording.
RQ1: What and how have digital applications been adopted in Entrepreneurship Education
during the time of Covid-19?
This research question is to reveal digital adoption in Entrepreneurship institutes, from the
perspectives of (i) ‘what applications have been used’, (ii) ‘why they were chosen’, (iii) ‘how
long they have been applied’, and (iv) how they have been implemented among teachers, and
learners (students).
66
2. As we all know, Covid-19 has brought significant change in many aspects of our
life, including teaching/ studying the master program of entrepreneurship.
May you help recall since when you needed to shift from campus teaching to online
teaching? Is it totally transferred to online, or blended both campus and online?
How was the new teaching model decided and communicated to the teacher of
entrepreneurship program?
Which department/ Who lead this “change implementation” follow, any guideline
framework to follow?
3. What are the digital applications that the university, and entrepreneurship
program used in conducting lectures for students? Why did the institute choose
XX? what are the criteria to choose certain application in teaching
entrepreneurship?
(Probe: is there any other digital tools you use, either for teaching, reviewing
assignments, and grading? etc)
4. What are the features inside those applications that you usually use to assist your
teaching? Why you use that? In normal on-campus teaching, what method should be
usually used instead?
how about the efficiency of preparation for each class, does it help you save time and
even need more time?
5. How is the effectiveness of the features you have tried compared to your own
expectation? What can be the potential reasons?
(Probe: which feature you like the most? which feature you tried for once and will
never try again, why? how does it help on your teaching, including both preparing
for the course and delivering lectures in online class)
6. Was that the first time you used those applications?
(Yes →) Did you learn how to use the application on your own or through any training class?
(No → ) Previously on what occasion did you use that digital application?
RQ2: In what way do EE's purpose, method, experience and result of teaching and learning
entrepreneurship have been changed under impacts of the digital adoption due to Covid-19?
67
7. Originally, what is/ are the key purpose and focus of EE in your program? Compared
to the study of Alian Fayolle who categorized the purpose of EE into 3 types: Educate
for, about, and in entrepreneurship; what type of purpose that you think the institute
is pursuing?
8. Is there any specific paradigm of educating entrepreneurship being applied to serve
these purposes? / educational framework
(provide explanation if needed:
‘educate for entrepreneurship is also the most wanted outcome of educators, as it is to “create
an entrepreneur" who decides to start a new business, here the teachers expect to stimulate
the process of entrepreneurship, to offer necessary facilities to build a new venture;
‘educate about entrepreneurship’ refer to the perspective of obtaining general knowledge
about entrepreneurship “as a phenomenon”;
‘educate in entrepreneurship’ targets at shaping student to become a more entrepreneurial
individual in companies)
9. When Covid-19 happened, is there any challenge to still deliver the above objectives
and key focus of the program. Is there any shift or change regarding purpose or
expectation from your site when teaching in such new circumstances? What are the
reasons behind these changes?
10. Normally what are the measurements / indicators for the academy to monitor the
quality and effectiveness of EE in each class?
11. “Practical project involvement” is among your key emphasis in program introduction,
how are these courses or projects been organized to deliver to students? How was it
different from the time before Covid-19? (Probe: what can be the potential reasons
for these differences?)
12. Now in overall, if we purely compare assignments and exam results of students,
before and during Covid-19, what is your feeling about the average performance of
the class, is there any difference?
13. Do you feel satisfied with the result? And is there any change in assessment criteria
for theoretical and practical courses from your site? (If yes: what are the reasons for
those changes? Does it mean the quality of 2 entrepreneurship classes: totally on-
campus and blended between on-campus and digital are different?)
RQ3: What are the lessons to learn and apply after Covid-19, in the perspective of both
teachers, and students?
68
14. Now let's review the whole process of adopting the digital pedagogy paradigm and
your own teaching experience. Firstly, is there any positive impact and change it
brings to the academy, and to yourself?
15. When I interview teachers and students, a lot of them mentioned “we are forced to
change, and get to learn and apply everything in a short period of time”. So in case
we have more time to prepare for a better plan to proactively due with any sudden
shock like this to the academy, what do you think that “better” part should be?
16. Which aspect do you think that current digitalization still can deliver in the course or
even better, and which can not?
17. Before Covid-19, EE had been sticked into 100% on campus teaching, during Covid-
19, the shift from offline to online, or blended mode was implemented quickly on
such a large scale. So after Covid-19, I mean when everything resumes to normal, do
you plan to have any change in educating entrepreneurship? Such as the objective,
teaching model, method, course structure, etc. Or just moving back to exactly the
same operation before Covid?
(Probe: any method retain?) Normally who foster the change implementation if there
is any new innovation taken place in the program?
Thank the interviewee.
Interview guide - for students or fresh graduate
Semi-structured interview
Respondent
Name:
University:
Studying program (or just graduated):
Introduction for the qualitative interview
Length: 30 – 45 minutes.
Goal: To have a conversation, discussion with the focus on your reflection about digital
adoption in entrepreneurship and its relevant impacts on your studying activities.
69
Background information
Ice breaking, invite interviewee to briefly introduce about him/herself: general information
and academic background
Ask for consent of audio recording the interview.
1. May you kindly introduce yourself?
2. Since when have you been enrolled in the master program of entrepreneurship?
Note: If the interviewee agrees, turn on “Voice memo” application and start recording.
RQ1: What and how have digital applications been adopted in Entrepreneurship Education
during the time of Covid-19?
3. As we all know, Covid-19 has brought significant change in many aspects of our life,
including teaching/ studying the master program of entrepreneurship. May you help recall
since when you needed to shift from on-campus to online study? How was the new study
mode communicated to you?
4. What is/are the digital application that you use to study in class and group work? Do
you know why your institute chose that application? (Probe: is there any other digital
tools you use, for example self study after class or group discussion, etc.)
5. Was that the first time you used those applications?
(Yes →) Did you learn how to use the application on your own or through any training class?
(No → ) Previously on what occasion did you use that digital application?
RQ2: In what way do EE's purpose, method, experience and result of teaching and learning
entrepreneurship have been changed under impacts of the digital adoption due to Covid-19?
70
6. Originally, what was your own expectation when choosing this program to study?
7. When Covid-19 happened, is there any challenge to still meet the above objectives/
expectations towards the program?
8. Is there any shift or change regarding purpose or expectation from your site when
teaching in such new circumstances? What are the reasons behind these changes?
9. Now, to what extent do you think the above objectives were well delivered, please
rate from 1 to 5 with 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest.
10. What are the features inside those applications that the teachers or you usually use to
assist your studying? Why do they/you use that? In normal on-campus study, what
methods were used instead?
11. Are these “digitalization” how you to be more effiency, or let save have more time to
self study?
12. How is the effectiveness of the features you have tried compared to your own
expectation? What can be the potential reasons? (Probe: which feature you like the
most? which feature you tried for once and will never try again, why? how does it
help on your studying, including study in class, self study or group work, etc)
13. “Practical project involvement” is among the key emphasis in program introduction,
how have these courses or projects been organized to deliver to you? Do you think
this way of conducting is effective enough and why?
14. Now in overall, if we purely compare assignments and exam results, before and
during Covid-19, how does the trend look like?
15. Do you feel satisfied with the result, why?
RQ3: What are the lessons to learn and apply after Covid-19, in the perspective of both
teachers, and students?
16. Now let's review the whole process of adopting digital applications on your own
Master program study experience. Firstly, is there any positive impact and change it
brings to you?
17. What are the areas that the institute, teacher, and yourself can do even better during
adopting digital applications in entrepreneurship education?
18. Before Covid-19, EE has been sticked with 100% on campus teaching, during Covid-
19, the shift from offline to online, or blended mode was implemented quickly on
such a large scale. So after Covid-19, I mean when everything resumes to normal, do
you think there should be any change in educating entrepreneurship? Such as the
objective, teaching model, method, course structure, etc. Or just moving back to
exactly the same operation before Covid?
Thank the interviewee.
Transcripts: Available upon request