Design of small private online courses (SPOCs) for Innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) Doctoral-level education

Teaching innovation and entrepreneurship is a challenging task. It requires students to gain an understanding of key terminology and theoretical knowledge as well as practical experience to build transversal skills. This is what is needed to develop a problem-solving and enterprising attitude for the jobs of tomorrow. At doctoral level, educating STEM graduates to become entrepreneurs and digital leaders in the digital transformation era calls for new learning formats and contents. In this paper we present a new design for the EIT Digital Doctoral School Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) education and we specifically focus on the online educational components developed to cover key I&E content and topics. We present the first results of an evaluation conducted with the students participating in all the courses of the EIT Digital Doctoral School in 2019 and the first impressions and learnings from the new design. We found that the initial feedback was satisfying and that our students appreciated the approach and said that they recommend that instructors use this approach in future teaching. This study contributes to the ongoing debate on how to design and implement I&E education leveraging European universities networks.