Looping Everyone into the Conversation

Abstract

At its most fundamental, entrepreneurship involves discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities to create future goods and services (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Acknowledging that characteristics, emotions, cognitive biases, and past experiences influence entrepreneurial activity and decision making (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2017; De Winnaar and Scholtz, 2019), many propose that active reflection is an important facet of the entrepreneurial curricula (Nabi et al., 2016; Santos et al., 2016). For the entrepreneurial student, learning to make rationale decisions is paramount, and this is vitally linked to their ability to reflect and be self-aware.
 This study recounts the use of the eportfolio within a new large class (over 600 students) module in enterprise education. The module utilised an eportfolio reflective assignment to allow students express their feelings and knowledge about a series of attended entrepreneurial events and guest speaker seminars. In this paper, we present a novel insight into the efficacy of this curricular approach. External stakeholders who acted as mentors and speakers were asked to review a number of these student portfolios, and provide their thoughts on the assignments themselves, and the e-portfolio construct more generally. As such, this study highlights the multiple feedback loops of reflection which can be obtained from the eportfolio when used as a carefully considered pedagogical tool. It also highlights the integral role that industry stakeholders play in the enterprise curriculum.