Curriculum Preferences and Engagement of Online Entrepreneurship Students: The Influence of Age and Gender

Abstract It is important for instructors and institutions to create learning experiences that are engaging, effective, and meaningful for students. To achieve these goals, instructors must understand the preferences and interests of their students, build engaging lessons based on those interests, and mitigate content that might make students feel excluded. In-person learning allows instructors to gather information about interests and engagement through direct interaction with students. Gathering information about student interests and engagement is more difficult for asynchronous, self-paced, online training programs. In this paper, we assess the interests, engagement, and disengagement of learners accessing online content focused on entrepreneurship. We focus on the influence of the demographic variables of age and gender and utilize data from Google Analytics to test hypotheses about the relationship between these variables and how the students interact with elements of the curriculum. STATA 18.0 was used for the statistical analysis. We find that while there are significant differences in the preferences for different elements of the curriculum based on gender and age, there is no evidence of a significant difference in curriculum engagement based on these demographic factors. These results support the conclusion that entrepreneurship students in this kind of learning environment select topics that are influenced by their gender and age. However, once the path is selected, engagement with the curriculum does not appear to vary with these individual characteristics.