Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the Self-Reliant and Localized Economy

Innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) are two closely related words that go hand in hand in this era. Innovation is about applying creativity for different engineering/technology/service problems and producing unique solutions, while entrepreneurship is about applying the same to bring ideas to life by making them feasible to work. It is also about doing the business work. In this chapter, the authors review how innovation and entrepreneurship help create a self-reliant and localized economy. The chapter also looks at the importance of introducing entrepreneurship and innovation to an academic curriculum. By this approach, universities can reduce the gap of introducing the I&E concepts and use their synergies with the engineering technology course contents to create an innovative mindset, thereby creating a self-reliant and localized economy.

Undergraduate Students Engagement in Formal and Informal Learning: Applying the Community of Inquiry Framework

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to examine the evidence of formal and informal learning of students in an undergraduate educational technology course for preservice teachers. The research question was, “How do undergraduate students in an educational technology course bridge formal and informal learning using Twitter?” The framework for this study was the Community of Inquiry. Directed content analysis was used on data extracted from Twitter. Key findings included, (1) evidence of cognitive, social, and teaching presence for students completing course activities using Twitter, that is, for their formal learning; and that (2) students developed competencies during formal course activities using Twitter that supported cognitive and social presence beyond the course requirements, that is, for their informal learning.

Discent perspectives on the teaching and learning process in a technology course in legal services in distance education modality

The general objective of the study was to describe and analyze students' perspectives on the teaching and learning process in a technology course in legal services in distance education. The study also aimed to identify the profile of the student in the Legal Services course; describe the mastery of digital information and communication technologies by the students of the course; describe the teaching and learning process in the analyzed course; and to analyze the learning difficulties described by the students. Descriptive research with a quantitative and qualitative approach to data analysis was carried out with students from the second, third and fourth semesters of the technology course in Legal Services at a distance from a private university center in northern Paraná. The results obtained indicate that the greatest difficulties that students encounter in this context are of a personal nature. Within this category, academic difficulties predominate, followed by socioeconomic and structural difficulties that obtained the same percentage and difficulties in motivation. Despite indicating that the greatest learning difficulty is of a personal nature, when asked what could make them learn better, the majority indicated changes in instructional design.

A Study of First-Year Students’ Attitudes toward Programming in the Innovation in Educational Technology Course

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students’ attitudes toward programming, gender, and learning performances. The survey used for measuring students’ attitudes toward programming consisted of 20 questions on a five-point Likert scale in five dimensions (meaningfulness, interest in programming, self-efficacy, creativity, and collaboration). Ninety freshmen who had basic programming experience by using block-based programming in the Innovation in Educational Technology course were asked to take the survey. The overall reliability of the survey was found to be 0.93. The results showed that there was no significant difference between male and female freshmen in attitude toward programming, but there was a significant difference among different learning performances in dimensions of interest in programming, self-efficacy, and creativity. We performed pairwise comparisons at the same level of significance by using Fisher’s least significant difference (LSD) method to test which group differs from the other groups. The results found that low-performing students’ attitudes toward programming in dimensions of interest in programming, self-efficacy, and creativity were the lowest of all types of students. This is a challenge for instructors in planning learning activities to encourage low-performing students to have a more positive attitude toward programming.