The InnoSchool project team, under the close coordination of Board of Education for Vienna, European Office has reached these days, an important step in the process of developing the InnoSchool Learning System (ILS). After an intense interaction between project partners, the concept clearly identifies the learning objectives, the structure of the ILS, the activities per modules, and relevant impact measurement elements as well.

So ´Introduction´ describes the overall aim of the InnoSchool project, and the defined mission the ILS is based on: ´Strengthening social innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit of secondary school students´. In order to achieve attractiveness and educational impact among the young between age 16-18, the project´s innovative character relies on four basic elements: (A) the serious game, (B) the social media's and interschool competition's aspect, (C) inclusive design and development process of the ILS involving all relevant stakeholders, and (D) development of action plans to ensure sustainability and wide impact on society.

Chapter 2 explains the core objectives of ILS that are (1) strengthening social innovation and building social entrepreneurial spirit among the young, (2) creating awareness about local unmet social needs, (3) supporting innovative thinking and creativity by finding innovative solutions, (4) encouraging capitalization of solutions via entrepreneurial activities, (5) implementing a learning environment that focus on developing of entrepreneurial skills and competences, (6) being able to generate ideas based on analyzing current situations; and (7) turning ideas into actions, i.e. in this case preparing business models, and business plans. Also the strategic impact of the ILS referring to the impact of the ILS is described. From the benefits of the ILS implementation we can mention that (I) students will gain new skills and competences, (II) will support teamwork and sensibility for societal issues, (III) will support transversal skills and creative thinking, (IV) will learn through real-life good practices, (V) schools will be provided with methodological and technical support in order to teach the 7th key competence “Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship” (defined by the European Parliament in 2006[i], revised in 2018 to Entrepreneurship competence[ii]), (VI) will strengthen the role of the teachers as mentors by training materials, didactical and methodological collection and support, and (VII) testing ILS as an applicable tool to strengthen entrepreneurial skills´ and ´upcoming social innovations´.

These are some examples of the impact ILS has: (a) students who participated the ILS serious game and benefit the learning outcomes are sensitized towards social challenges, (b) by entering the ILS serious game, awareness will be fostered for local unmet real-life social needs,(c) social entrepreneurial spirit will be strengthened among the young,  the ILS incl. serious game (d) will support critical and innovative thinking and creativity by finding innovative solutions, (e)  will develop the digital skills of the students,  the ILS incl. serious game together with the offline classroom activities (f) will create an innovative learning environment that focuses on developing  social entrepreneurial skills and competences, and (g) will foster generating, developing, and ideally turning ideas into actions.

Furthermore, Chapter 2 gives an overview of the related theoretical background outlining e.g. The ENTRECOMP, the Entrepreneurship Competence framework elaborated by the European Commission[iii], the common reference framework accepted by the EU that identifies 15 competences in three key areas that describe what it means to be entrepreneurial.

The entrepreneurial mindset, and its elements, the key competences of the EU, different frameworks of relevant skills of competences are also described in this part. Last, but not least, the social entrepreneurial mindset is defined, i.e. combining societal goals with an entrepreneurial spirit. They have a slightly different entrepreneurial “drive” based on the social entrepreneurial mindset.

Chapter 3 summarizes the strategic framework of the InnoSchool Learning System with its four key elements (1) web-based serious game, (2) teachers handbook, (3) social media elements, and (4) inter-school competition.

This Chapter shows the 6 modules of ILS framework matched with the categories of Bloom´s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956, p. 200)[iv] in order to create learning goals suitable for all involved countries, such as the structure of the online serious game and offline classroom activities as complementary element of the ILS.

The ILS has 6 modules. Five modules fit to learners schedule with basic previous knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship, and module 6 was rather created as additional module for more advanced students who already have existing knowledge on which to build the learning procedure. Assuming two lessons per week, the duration of the ILS is ideally 5-6 weeks in case of the students on basic level, and 6-8 weeks for the advanced participants.

Each module has 4 parts:

1. Introductory classroom activity – 15 min long 
2. Online serious game activity in the classroom – 30 min long
3. Follow-up classroom activities – 45 min long
4. Follow-up/wrap-up part within the online serious game.

This respective chapter contains also the summary of Educational Framework Mapping done by the project partners and the presence of entrepreneurship education in the involved countries. As the last part of this chapter, the impact measurement of the ILS on students´ performance is described by some examples of both ex-ante and ex-post assessment tools.

References:

[i] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32006H0962&from=EN

[ii] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32018H0604(01)&from=EN

[iii] Bacigalupo, M., Kampylis, P., Punie, Y., Van den Brande, G. (2016).EntreComp: The Entrepreneur-ship Competence Framework. Luxembourg: Publication Office of the European Union; EUR 27939 EN; doi:10.2791/593884

[iv] Bloom, B.S. (Ed.). Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., Krathwohl, D.R. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc., p.200