How to engage students in blended entrepreneurship courses

The aim of this study was to investigate how to engage upper secondary level students when learning in a blended learning environment. Digital course material about entrepreneurship and global business was created on a digital learning platform called Claned. As a result, 4 digital Business Courses were established. With an aim to design course materials that promote engaging learning, a specific pedagogical script was first prepared based on the Engaging Learning Environment-model and then piloted in practice [1] [2]. This study examines the results of the pilot phase and reveals how the course material, based on pedagogical script, managed to engage students and promote learning. The data was collected during the pilot phase of the courses, where 261 students answered open-ended questions about how they had experienced the content of different assignments from the perspective of their own learning. After this, the data was content analyzed and the results, in a form of an example assignment, were compared with the ratings provided by the learning analytics of Claned. The results shed light on the importance of pedagogical pre-planning when designing new educational contents and provided concrete examples on how this can be done in practice.