Author(s): Josee Audet, Maripier Tremblay, Simon Chartier, Claudine Contreras
Entrepreneurial education opportunities have literally exploded in recent years. In addition to traditional classroom offerings, apprentice entrepreneurs now also have Web-based education options that have been greatly enhanced. However, where classroom education assessments have been the subject of many studies, online training has been scarcely documented. This therefore begs the question: Can online education provide not only greater access and opportunities for more people to develop entrepreneurial skills, but do so with the same relative effectiveness as classroom teaching? To answer this question, a survey was conducted with 395 university students enrolled in an introductory entrepreneurship course. The students were given the option of taking the online or classroom versions of the course. The results indicate that all of the students achieved the course's academic objectives satisfactorily, but the students enrolled in a classroom section of the course reported having better achieved the objectives than those who completed the online version of the course. The findings also show that the students enrolled in the online course reported the highest interest in one day becoming an entrepreneur. It is important to note that an increase in entrepreneurial interest was observed among all of the students who completed both versions of the course, which is a highly encouraging finding.