E-learning in Entrepreneurship – Development towards Social Media

In the future more and more attention will be paid to online learning environments and use of applications of social media in education. Teacher’s role has been changed towards tutoring and coaching. Applications of developing tech-nology create new possibilities with new challenges. Since 1999 there has been web-based entrepreneurship course available through Averko – Open Online University of Applied Sciences. In this practical presentation we will reflect the course “enterprise establishing and business planning” and show how the course has been developed. The course consists of two parts: 1) establishing an enterprise and 2) doing a business plan. The first part of the course was put in the practice as one of the very first Averko courses. Later the course extended into whole business planning and the total scale is four credits. The participants of the course are both university students and private persons. Learning entrepreneurship through web-based system has some advantages, but there are some challenges, too. From the pedagogical point of view the course emphasizes authentic learning with close connections with real world. The design characteristics of authentic activities include also unique, ill-defined tasks, possibilities to collaborate, integrate across different subject areas, reflection of learning and diversity of outcome. The business ideas rise from students own goals and experiences and every business plan is different. When interview-ing entrepreneurs the students are able to get realistic understanding about entrepreneurship. Development process of the course has been continuous improvement and in different stages the development of interactive e-learning systems is expressing itself, too. In the beginning the students and tutors encountered also technological problems with first generation e-learning applications. Today the big issue is how to utilize social media in entrepreneurship education. During year 2010 some parts of the course will be reconstructed by introducing some application of social media. In this practical paper these renewals will be described with arguments of authentic learning.