Entrepreneurship and Innovativeness in an eLearning Training Project in Romania

This paper reports on an eLearning training project from the perspectives of entrepreneurship and innovativeness. We present the project/case at hand and report on it as it is relevant for both project entrepreneurship, and innovativeness in projects and training. The project1 took place between 2010 and 2013 (with extra activities in 2014) and had as (now fulfilled) objective training 2000 secondary education teachers in Romania in using eLearning tools in their activity. On the issue of entrepreneurship in project development we report on the entrepreneurial experience of initiating the project and putting together an international project partnership. The project idea was innovative in that eLearning was rather new in Romania and the capability to use ICT in education also rather recently acquired. The project was innovative and entrepreneurial in that it provided a unique and ambitious solution to satisfying at the same time: the needs of trainees, the requirements of the financing authority and the capabilities and objectives of partnering organizations. We show how developing a project was not just a matter of a good idea, but one of its successive refinements while simultaneously finding and defining the right partnership for project implementation. We also report on the multidimensional innovative aspects of project implementation in terms of: training needs assessment (an extensive effort to study the training needs of project's target group led to the first representative survey of ICT use, access, skills, and attitudes in Romania), course offering and training methods (including innovative methods such as: blended learning; using some of the same tools that are taught and therefore learning by doing, defining course offering based on needs assessment), technology infrastructure and tools (a unique challenge of integrating multiple open source technologies such as portal, eLearning and forum tools into one single seamless experience, as well as using games for learning), and outcomes assessment (a constant concern with monitoring feedback and outcomes through feedback and follow up questionnaires).