Abstract
Higher education provides plenty of opportunity for theory and in many cases, even the ability to apply theory in a laboratory setting. Yet, there remains limited opportunity for students to learn by doing through participation in authentic learning experiences. The purpose of this paper is to provide one potential solution for integrating authentic learning into the engineering classroom by cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset. As entrepreneurship serves as an integral part of the economy, developing an entrepreneurial mindset through authentic learning experiences is essential for engineers. While online discussion prompts represent a useful way for educators to facilitate student learning, less is known about how to facilitate online discussions in a way that truly cultivates an entrepreneurial mindset for engineering students. In this paper, the key intentions of entrepreneurially-minded learning are reviewed, and a guide for creating online discussions applicable to any engineering course is presented. Example online discussion prompts incorporating the entrepreneurial mindset are then shared from an Introduction to Engineering course. Results from a mixed methods survey instrument suggests positive impacts towards student perceptions of online discussions and development of the entrepreneurial mindset. Recommendations for effectively and efficiently facilitating online discussions for entrepreneurially-minded learning in the engineering classroom are offered.
Highlights
Because entrepreneurship serves as the backbone of the US economy, it is critical for engineering educators to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in their students [16]
This paper set out to provide a guide for cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students through online discussion prompts
We reviewed the key intentions for teaching the entrepreneurial mindset as well as the benefits of online discussion prompts
Summary
Higher education provides plenty of opportunity for theory and even the ability to apply theory in the laboratory setting, students are sometimes left with limited opportunity to learn by doing through participation in authentic learning experiences This is particular problematic in theory heavy courses, often found in engineering disciplines. In these types of design-oriented the engineering design process throughout the course, culminating in a real-world design project. Courses, students apply the engineering design process throughout the course, culminating in a realThis allows the student to consider connecting class topics to Brown’s [30] concept of most valuable world design project. The open-ended questions andpretheand firstpost-assessment two scale questions explore student perceptions related engineering classroom Both the included three open-ended qualitative to questions learning outcomes. “Formulating assessment included quantitative to explore student related to the questions and generating own inquiries”
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