Making the Student Learning Experience Fun, Memorable and Effective: A Case of Entrepreneurship Students
Keywords:
Team learning, Competition, Entrepreneurship Education, Learning Experience, Deep LearningAbstract
The goal of every passionate educator is to ensure that his or her students adopt a deep learning approach to the material being taught so that they can apply these concepts in their lives beyond the classroom. This is particularly true for entrepreneurship students who are expected to establish their own businesses after graduating from university. In order to achieve this very important objective, it is vital that the educator does everything in his or her power to ensure that the students‘ learning experiences are made as enjoyable and as memorable as possible. This paper presents the achievement of this objective amongst a group of entrepreneurship students in Nigeria through the introduction of a team learning competition concept in an Organizational Behaviour course over two years. Students were required to form same-gender groups of five and establish companies. Each group was then required to make thirty-minute oral presentations explaining their company‘s organizational culture and the strategies adopted to ensure that the culture permeated every aspect of the business. The team with the best presentation was awarded a monetary prize at the end of the semester. Observations of the students‘ behaviours before, during and after the presentations revealed that the students‘ engagement in the course was exponentially enhanced as evidenced by their unbridled enthusiasm and creative approaches to the presentations. It is recommended that entrepreneurship and business educators adopt a similar approach so as to elevate the students‘ learning experiences, and make the university career a fun, memorable and effective one as opposed to the current tortuous grind that it is now, particularly from a Nigerian context.
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