Entrepreneurship Education through MOOCs for Accelerated Economic Growth

Entrepreneurship is a key driver of economic growth of a country. However, concerns on uncertainty associated with entrepreneurship drive parents to motivate children during their formative days to aspire for permanent jobs and they grow with that aspiration. Many have provided empirical evidences supporting motivational effect of entrepreneurial education even though formal entrepreneurship education is yet to gain traction in emerging economy, proliferation of which may entail prohibitively huge resources. MOOCs can obviate the need for infrastructure and other resources and can promote entrepreneurial education to a large audience of heterogeneous mix. We argue that MOOCs bring enormous advantages in terms of cost, flexibility of time, breaking geographical boundary, removing entry barrier and promoting entrepreneurial education to a large pool of students and professionals. It can bring about revolutionary change in the mind-set of a generation of youth motivating them to promote entrepreneurial ventures. MOOCs can also play a significant role in a new and fast evolving corporate strategic process of 'corporate entrepreneurship' by offering flexible learning opportunity to related employees. Using data from various developed and emerging world we show in this paper that entrepreneurship education is essential for economic growth and quality of life of people of a nation. We also highlight some of the challenges in open teaching and outline the possible contents of such education.