International entrepreneurship education: postgraduate business students experiences of entrepreneurship education

Objectives The study aims to enhance understanding of the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in meeting the expectations and motivations of international postgraduate students participating in UK business & management education. Specifically, it explores within sample groups of learners: RQ1. What is the typical profile of the international students’ prior education and work experience? RQ2. What do students expect from studying an entrepreneurship PG course in the UK? RQ3. What are their experiences of, and learning outcomes from, the entrepreneurship course? RQ4. What benefits regarding their skills and knowledge do they perceive result from participation? Prior Work International Postgraduate education has grown substantially in the last decade (UUK, 2010). There has been significant growth in international postgraduate student participation in UK business related subjects, involving both MBA and other Masters’ programmes such as MSc in Management and a range of specialist awards, which increasingly offer Entrepreneurship as a core or option. Prior research focuses on transnational comparisons between France, Germany and Poland (Packham et al, 2010) USA, Spain and China (Pruett et al, 2009) Africa and Europe (Davey et al, 2011) China (Millman et al, 2010) and Poland (Jones, et al, 2011) with relatively little research specifically addressing entrepreneurship for international students on postgraduate courses in the UK (Hall and Sung, 2009, Liu, 2010). Approach This article originates in the authors’ experiences in running postgraduate entrepreneurship modules for international students in UK Business Schools. They found that students often experienced concerns about a ‘mismatch’ between their expectations of UK business and management education and their actual experiences, with experiences of cultural tensions between prior learning experiences and their acculturation to the requirements and norms of UK business education. The study is a microcosm of a wider issue as these concerns are shared more generally by international Postgraduate students. Results The results confirmed that career development was a major motivator for international study in the UK. Interest in entrepreneurship is increasing but there are tensions between the expectations of the postgraduate experience and the experienced reality. Entrepreneurship was in some cases seen as a distinctive ‘peak experience’, but cultural factors, learning effectiveness and linguistic capability need to be addressed in designing learning programmes. Implications The study contributes new evidence and ideas to the debate on entrepreneurship education in meeting the career expectations and motivations of international postgraduate students participating in entrepreneurship education, especially in the light of new curricular guidance (QAA, 2012) and UK government regulation. Value It offers suggestions for educators on the effective design and delivery of entrepreneurship for international students in the rapidly changing and competitive postgraduate market

Academic writing and the art of the possible

Over the last thirty years the demographic profile of Australian universities has changed significantly to include increasing numbers not only of international students, but also of local students whose first language is other than English, mature age 'second chance' students, VET articulants, and students from migrant, indigenous, rural, or lower socio-economic backgrounds. Such a change has coincided with an institutional shift towards a corporatised and vocationalised higher education environment. This paper addresses the challenge of supporting the learning needs, particularly the literacy learning needs, of the new demographic within a changed environment. It addresses three concerns: firstly, that traditional approaches to literacy support are inadequate and inappropriate to the needs of non-traditional students; secondly, that a vocationalised curriculum does not address basic literacy; and, thirdly, that corporatisated higher education privileges economy, efficiency, and standardisation over contingent learning support needs. The paper considers how these concerns might be negotiated by offering the case of a literacy support program that engages with a vocational/corporate discourse to create new possibilities for meeting students' literacy support needs

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Ingrafica, International Festival of Contemporary Engraving City of Cuenca, is an international platform to support the creation, promotion and dissemination of contemporary printmaking and other forms of multiple art. Its purpose is to reflect on the engraving as an artistic discipline of XXI century, acting as a meeting point and consultation between the professionals and concerned citizens recorded in going in this artistic discipline and its variants. Ingráfica is the only non-commercial event with the world of graphic, which is held annually in Spain. The main aim of this paper is to determine the impact of Ingráfica in the city of Cuenca, with a view to taking appropriate strategies to the profile of the attendees. It also wants to know the satisfaction of visitors with different activities of Ingráfica

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An Environmental Perspective on Seattle

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