Author(s): Doris Padmini Selvaratnam
Entrepreneurial courses are designed specifically to enhance the entrepreneurship skills in individuals. At the university level, all the students take foundation entrepreneurship courses and then only those who are interested to pursue entrepreneurship career path will engage in modules at the second and third year of their studies. There are few students who pursue this path compared to those who choose to focus on different areas of expertise - i.e. law, medicine, pedagogy, engineering, creative media, etc. Many are not continuously and consciously cultivating their inert entrepreneurial skills. Skills that will among others help enhance self-confidence, time management, and prudence in deliberating issues, money savvy techniques and developing forecasting scenarios. Therefore, the aim of this study was to embed entrepreneurial skills or values in non-conventional business or entrepreneurship courses. This paper discusses the embedding of entrepreneurial skills through the subject of EPPD1013 Microeconomics 1 at the undergraduate level. A total of 44 students enrolled for the subject were exposed to an element of entrepreneurship in one of the course topics. The trait expounded was “enhancing confidence level” while the topic deliberated upon was “Firms and Perfect Competition Market”. Quantitative data analysis is based on exam results obtained while the qualitative descriptive analysis is a result of classroom activity and responses from the students. Using this new disruptive learning method allowed the students to be actively engaging in classroom discussion, participate creatively while sourcing for information and enhancing their ability to retain information better. Results demonstrate that students have better scores for topic conducted using the disruptive method incorporating entrepreneurial values compared to other topics assessed delivered in the traditional method. In future, more similar experiments should be conducted to validate this case study to ensure that graduates have higher entrepreneurial values and subject evaluation performance.