Alvaro Pina Stranger, German Varas Espinoza, Gaëlle Mobuchon
Education on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) has increased in the last two decades, specially, through MOOCs. Lately, these reusable online alternatives have tended to be revalorized by HEIs into blended learning activities, posing new challenges for instructors, specially, on how to bridge prior knowledge with in-class activities. Adopting a discursive approach to knowledge, our proposal aims to meet this challenge by identifying student’s “representations”, i.e., patterned constructions on disciplinary knowledge. Representations can be found across different cohorts and thus further complemented by instructors. To test this assumption and build our proposal, we analyzed student’s representations in two observations. We mapped students’ representations over key I&E definitions (e.g., “start-up”) and, to know how prior knowledge may be complemented by instructors, we identified students’ alignment with expert disciplinary knowledge. Firstly, we found that the two cohorts tended to express representations by turning attention to different dimensions, e.g., referring to different types of “features” or “finalities” associated with concepts. Secondly, the description of disciplinary alignment revealed that students tend to focus on the same components of experts’ definitions, but with a greater level of generality. Our results have been packaged into a proposal that aims to help instructors scale their blended activities.