Bridging Theory to Practice Through a Flipped Classroom Approach in an Enterpreneurship Course

Abstract

While entrepreneurship education (EE) finds itself middle in a debate of whether entrepreneurship can be taught or not, it has more relevance today than ever before (Neck & Greene, 2011). At the University of Pretoria, the focus is on starting up businesses, self-employment and creating employment. While the curriculum is set and allows little foray, lecturers strive to improve the quality of teaching and learning, making the best use of the available infrastructure, class-time and technology. There is a lively debate on the merits of teaching traditional lecture-based classes versus using technology for teaching, and how they can be improved, blended, hybridised or flipped. In the developed world with ubiquitous access to technology and internet, flipped classroom teaching has become synonymous with blended learning and very much the norm. While video lectures are not new, the affordances of videos, screencasts, audio lectures and the like can add real value to a flipped classroom. It is in this arena that a third-year course in entrepreneurship was flipped in 2015, and reported in this article. The study investigates both the instruction method as well as the application of theory through tutorials.