Assessing the Effect of Online Courses in Entrepreneurship

How can online-based education be best used to influence pupils to consider an entrepreneurial career? Do the short and long-term impacts of different tools vary?

Entrepreneurial and innovative skills are increasingly needed in today’s labour market. While entrepreneurship training has often concentrated on tertiary education, this project aims to understand the possible advantages of starting entrepreneurship education earlier.  The trial will test different online-based entrepreneurship programmes to a sample of 3,000 pupils in their ninth year of schooling.

Pupils will randomly be placed into one of two treatment groups or control group. The first treatment group will be offered a two-week experimental entrepreneurship course where students will be requested to perform daily challenges. The second treatment group will receive an entrepreneurship course around role models, with presentations from successful entrepreneurs. The effects of the different programmes will be measured using data on attitudes towards entrepreneurship, career intentions, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy after intervention, as well as measures such as educational performance and occupation 12 months after intervention.