Entrepreneurship Literacy for Educational Technology Students –

An Action Research

Riche Cynthia Johan, R Nadia Hanoum, Dadi Mulyadi and Muthia Alinawati

Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Jalan Setiabudhi 229, Bandung, Indonesia

riche@upi.edu

Keywords: Entrepreneurship Literacy, Educational Technology, Entrepreneurship Course, Action Research.

Abstract: Entrepreneurship education has become an important issue in higher education nowadays because it is part of

the process in shaping students’ entrepreneurial characters in order to respond to global challenges in building

a nation by creating their own jobs or becoming young entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship course is taken by

students of all study programs at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia. Making students to be literate in

entrepreneurship is more important as a form of learning outcome implementation so that students can start

their own business. In the context of educational technology, the literacy is directed towards developing the

competency of entrepreneurial character development in the field of educational technology. This study used

action research because it focuses on the improvement of the entrepreneurship course in order to conduct a

more effective course for students of educational technology department. The action research was conducted

in two cycles which involve planning, action, observation, and reflection. The research results are the

followings: 1) Map of business ideas in the field of educational technology; 2) Business plan; 3) Business

products in the field of educational technology.

1 INTRODUCTION

The implementation of entrepreneurship course in

higher education is intended to provide knowledge

and entrepreneurship experience and to foster

students’ motivation as new entrepreneur aspirants.

Realizing an effective entrepreneurship education

requires attention of several aspects. Kasih (2013)

reveals that aspects that must be considered in the

implementation of entrepreneurship course include

designing a clear and targeted entrepreneurship

curriculum, establishing appropriate method,

selecting teachers who have competence in the field

of entrepreneurship, creating entrepreneurship

atmosphere, and designing a gradual and continuous

learning process.

Although entrepreneurship education has been

implemented in universities, its contribution is not as

expected yet because the number of students involved

in entrepreneurship is still low. There is a number of

criticisms on the implementation of entrepreneurship

course, as pointed out by Dumiyati (2015), that the

material presentation in the course tends to be

theoretical and emphasizes cognitive aspect, not

contextual, lack of entrepreneurial practice, and lack

of facilities and infrastructure to train entrepreneurial

skills such as business incubators. Santosa (2014)

asserts that the weakness of entrepreneurship

development among students principally cannot be

separated from the learning method applied in

universities.

Sirelkhatim and Gangi (2015) found that common

practices of entrepreneurship education program in

higher education consisted of three main groups:

teaching “about” entrepreneurship, teaching “for”

entrepreneurship, and teaching “through”

entrepreneurship. While the first group was aimed at

increasing students’ awareness about

entrepreneurship, the second and the third group were

found to be more learner-centered, which focused on

building entrepreneurial skills and creating situation

that enables students to experience creating a new

business. Thus, learner-centered entrepreneurship

classes prefer to apply experiential teaching methods

which include the use of simulations, incubators,

internships, and live projects. In this case, out of these

methods, Ardianti (2009) revealed that for Indonesian

students doing real business or live project was the

most preferable. This is probably because this method

Johan, R., Hanoum, R., Mulyadi, D. and Alinawati, M.

Entrepreneurship Literacy for Educational Technology Students – An Action Research.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (ICEEE 2017), pages 587-592

ISBN: 978-989-758-308-7

587

makes learning more challenging and is relevant with

students’ needs. However, Sirelkhatim and Gangi

(2015) and Ardianti (2009) did not recommend any

instructional activities that can be replicated, as the

best practice of entrepreneurship education in higher

education.

This study was conducted as an effort to create a

learning process that could give students holistic

entrepreneurship knowledge and experience so that

not only did they aware about entrepreneurship but

they were also motivated to participate in

entrepreneurship project and would be able to run a

small business after completing the course. This study

aims to find out the pattern of learning activities

emphasizing the acquisition of business literacy skills

in the field of educational technology. The business

literacy in question is the ability to behave and act in

accordance with the learned knowledge conception,

to map entrepreneurship opportunities, to be ready

with creativity capital by finding innovative ideas and

explore independently business potentials through

good networking practice to sustain the

entrepreneurship effort.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Trends of Educational Technologist

Competencies

Educational technology involves the disciplined

application of knowledge for the purpose of

improving learning, instruction, and/or performance.

The notion of disciplined application of knowledge is

included here to reflect the view that educational

technology is an engineering discipline in the sense

that principles based on theory, past experience, and

empirical evidence guide what professional

educational technologists do. These principles are

derived from basic science and empirical research in

such areas as cognition, cybernetics, information

science, human factors, learning theory, mass

communications, message design, organizational

theory, and psychology. Educational technology is

inherently an interdisciplinary enterprise. The

principle of encouraging problem solvers to reflect on

the nature of the problem first can be traced to

research in cognitive psychology (Spector, 2016: 13).

Figure 1: Educational technologies and instructional

objects.

Educational technologists have different

perspectives on the various processes and activities

with which they are involved. Using technology to

promote learning, instruction, and performance is far

from a formulaic enterprise. There are many

approaches, methods, and tools to inform good

solutions for the challenging problems educational

technologists confront. Figure 1 represents a way to

view educational technology in terms of support for

learning and instruction, especially with regard to

instructional objects, (Spector, 2016).

Referring to the above trends of educational

technologist competencies, higher education

particularly educational technology study program

thus has the responsibility to prepare graduates with

academic and professional abilities to plan, develop,

utilize, manage, and evaluate learning instruction and

performance.

2.2 Entrepreneurship Literacy

An excellent definition of literacy is the “ability to

identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate,

compute and use printed and written materials

associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a

continuum of teach enabling individuals to achieve

their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential,

and to participate fully in their communities and

wider society”, (UNESCO, 2005).

Entrepreneurship education, embraces more than

specific the process of firm creation or the detection

of business opportunities. It is also the set of activities

that foster in the learners, or young people,

entrepreneurship mind-sets, attitudes and skills to

enable them to be more creative and self-confident in

whatever they undertake (European Commission,

2012). Therefore, entrepreneurship education aims to

develop more creative and innovative individuals,

who seize opportunities in their environment and who

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588

assume the risks to change things, achieving thus their

personal fulfilment, social inclusion, active

citizenship and employability in a knowledge-based

society (Bustamante, 2014).

The purpose of any literacy program is to reduce

the lack of knowledge, skills, attitudes and

capabilities to perform or undertake an activity. As it

was pointed before, we might consider that

entrepreneurship illiteracy may reflect: the lack of

capability to seize opportunities, to implement them

into a new venture that has to be managed or the lack

of a proactive attitude towards changes and

autonomous solutions. Hence, when implementing an

entrepreneurship program we may differentiate

between developing entrepreneurial attitudes, skills

and capabilities in any of the three previous domains

(Bustamante, 2014).

Amongst the most relevant entrepreneurship

attitudes are a sense of initiative, risk propensity, self-

efficacy, need for achievement and structural

behavior. Entrepreneurship skills are those required

to detect an idea and to combine resources to a more

effective or efficient use (Davidsson, 2003) from an

economic or social perspective. They are: creativity,

analytic thinking, motivation, networking and

adaptability (European Commission, 2012). Finally,

entrepreneurship (managerial) capabilities are the

knowledge, business skills and the practical know-

how and abilities to create, assess, manage and

sustain new ventures (Bustamante, 2014).

3 METHODS

The obvious aims of action research are actions of

improvement and involvement, i.e. firstly, the

improvement of teaching practice, secondly, the

improvement of the perception or understanding of

teaching practice by its practitioners, and thirdly, the

improvement of the concrete problematic situation by

joint collaboration of all involved in action research.

This entails a cyclical inquiry that involves planning,

acting, observing and reflecting and then re-planning,

further action, further observation and further

reflection, as illustrated in Figure 2 (Costello, 2003).

Figure 2: Action research cycle.

The subject of this research was students of

educational technology study program who were

currently in the sixth semester and took the

entrepreneurship course in 2015/2016 academic year.

The students consisted of 90 people and were divided

into two classes and eleven groups (7-9 people per

group). The action cycle was conducted twice with

details as follow.

3.1 Cycle I

 Planning: Preparing for learning instrument

and instrument for actions, of which filing

form as instrument for actions that allow

students to generate creative business ideas

and opportunities and diary as instrument to

describe entrepreneurship motivation.

 Action: Perform learning by giving out the

filing form containing business ideas.

 Observation: Observe how students explore

the possibilities of business ideas related to

educational technology that can be followed

up.

 Reflection: Review business ideas generated

from previous activity and prepare SWOT

analysis for business product development.

3.2 Cycle II

 Planning: In this second cycle, the planning

includes preparing for document of SWOT

analysis as part of the business plan.

 Action: Create product design to be exhibited

at the end of the course.

 Observation: Observe how students work in

groups to develop and present the business

proposal as well as how they exhibit and sell

their products during business exhibition at the

end of semester.

 Reflection: Review the output of the course by

assessing the business products generated and

evaluating the effectiveness of business

exhibition conducted.

4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1 Cycle I

Session 1 until session 7 of the course was dedicated

to provide theoretical foundation for students so that

they have broad entrepreneurial knowledge and

strong entrepreneurial spirit. The materials include:

(1) The concept of entrepreneurship, (2)

Entrepreneurship personality and characters, (3)

OBSERVE

REFLECT

PLAN

ACT

Entrepreneurship Literacy for Educational Technology Students – An Action Research

589

Profile of successful entrepreneur, (4)

Entrepreneurship management, (5) Acquiring capital,

(6) Marketing strategy, and (7) Entrepreneurial

opportunity in educational technology.

The first cycle was conducted from session 9 until

session 11, which was started by planning the

learning activities. The lecturer prepared a blank

concept map that should be filled by students in order

to generate business ideas. Each component of the

concept map was given one indicator following

5W+1H method. The descriptors of the 5W=1H

method are as follow:

 What, this question relates to the type of

business that will be run and it also explains

the strength and uniqueness of the product to

be developed in order to attract prospective

costumer to buy. In relation to educational

technology, this stage involved identifying the

challenging problems faced by educators and

finding out what instructional objects that can

be used to solve the problems, which finally

lead to promoting effective learning and

improve learning outcome (Spector, 2016).

 Why, this question explains why choosing

certain product or business and why customers

should buy it. This stage entailed students’

creativity in designing a product or an

instructional object and the application of

entrepreneurship mind-sets, attitudes and skills

(European Comission, 2012).

 Who, this question determines who will run

and manage the business and who will be

prospective customers.

 Where, this question relates to where the

business will be organized and where

customers gathered.

 When, this question determines when the

business will start; and

 How, this question explains how to run and

manage the business and how to market

products.

Actions conducted on the first cycle resulted in

identified students’ ability in processing and

understanding information related to business in

educational technology by starting to map business

ideas and their supported descriptors. Assessment on

students’ acquisition of entrepreneurship literacy in

educational technology revealed that the students

were able to develop entrepreneurial attitudes, skills

and capabilities (Bustamante, 2014), which was

shown by their motivation, innovation, and creativity

in generating business ideas (Davidsson, 2003;

European Comission, 2012) in the field of

educational technology, that were mapped and

presented in the Table 1 below.

Table 1: Educational technology business ideas.

Business Name Business Idea

Inikita Studio Inikita Studio is a business engaged

in media-based products and

services.

Paracord Paracord is a business related to

creation of learning media products

and services.

Warung

Grafika

Warung Grafika is a business

engaged in graphic media related

products and services. It offers art

of printing or lettering for various

rinting purposes.

Pakar Pakar is the acronym of Paper

Karya. Pakar focuses on simple

media based products and services.

The philosophy is making craft

using paper such as paper craft,

pop-up, and origami. These

products can be used as learning

media.

D'art

Photography

D'art Photography provides

products and services related to

photo media. The ability to create

photos is combined with the current

trends and technologies that allow

customers to put pictures or photos

they want on mug, plates, pins, etc.

Private

multimedia

Warung Grafika is a business that

provides products and services

using Computer Based Instruction

that is computer based learning

media. It runs its business based on

orders besides giving private course

on multimedia.

Design, fun

animal card,

and typography

Design, fun animal card, and

typography is a business that

provides graphic media based

products and services. It offers

cards or printed letter art that can be

used to decorate walls in schools to

make it more meaningful with

inspirational and beautiful words.

Popeye Popeye is a business that provides

products related to learning media

in the form of cartoon.

Moving

Forward

Moving Forward provides products

and services of various learning

media in the form of di

ital videos.

13 Project 13 Project business core is making

learning media for mathematic

subject in elementary school.

The results of cycle I suggest that students were

able to process and understand information related to

entrepreneurship literacy in the field of educational

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590

technology. This is shown by eleven business ideas

generated above, of which 9 businesses are related to

production of learning media and 2 businesses are

related to program evaluation services and learning

and teaching products.

4.2 Cycle II

The cycle II of the action research was conducted on

session 12 until session 16 of the course. Students

were given five weeks to make business plan, prepare

for their product design, make the products, and

deliver and exhibit their products at the exhibition

located in campus area. On this second cycle,

lecturers facilitate students to analyze the strength,

weakness, opportunities, and threats to their business,

which are presented in the form of business plan.

Group collaboration in making business plan was

developed well enough, which can be seen from the

quality of business proposals submitted.

Collaboration was also conducted with outside parties

in the form of mutual agreement especially in relation

to production of learning media as products to market.

Group work was chosen over individual work

because Jones and English (2004) found that students

showed less motivation, doubt, and confusion about

working individually on their business plan, which

might be due to the tension of creative process they

should experience. Collaboration helped reduce this

tension and made creative process challenging

instead of stressing. Consequently, students had high

motivation in realizing their businesses and could

develop and execute the business plan appropriately.

In addition, the products created could meet the

expectation of customers.

The business exhibition gained high appreciation

from visitors. Almost all groups sold their products

out and there were several business that got orders

from visitors. The exhibition process was also

evaluated by lecturers and the aspects of evaluation

were creativity, uniqueness, packaging, selling

actions, and cleanliness. In addition, peer assessment

was also conducted to measure individual

contribution and dedication to their group work. As

pointed out by Jones and English (2004), peer

assessment allows students to be aware of the

performance of their contribution to their group in

terms of their communication, coordination and

planning skills which are essential to develop their

capabilities as future entrepreneurs.

The results of cycle II suggest that students are

able to process and understand information related to

entrepreneurship literacy in the field of educational

technology. This is shown by the products exhibited

in the business exhibition, which has successfully

drawn many buyers and prospective customers. This

means that the businesses can keep running even after

the course ends and expect to grow into big business.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The purpose of any literacy program is to reduce the

lack of knowledge, skills, attitudes and capabilities to

perform or undertake an activity. This action research

allowed educational technology students to develop

and enhance their entrepreneurship literacy by first

building their knowledge on entrepreneurship, seize

business opportunities, create and market products

which will eventually develop their entrepreneurship

attitudes, skills, and capabilities.

This action research resulted in mapping of

business ideas, business plans, and business products

in the field of educational technology. Furthermore,

the undertaken entrepreneurship education program

has successfully brought learners to experience the

world of entrepreneurs, which motivated them to

develop their entrepreneurial skills instead of getting

high grades and to continue their business and make

it bigger.

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