Open Education on Social Entrepreneurship: A comparative study between Mexico and Bolivia to Scale up Complex Thinking

Abstract

The Open Education movement has tremendous transformative potential in developing countries and marginalized communities. The implementation of the OpenEdR4C platform, a digital educational resource for entrepreneurship education, was an example of this potential. As an open resource for scaling up complex thinking competencies in higher education students and lifelong learners, the platform has been presented to various institutions and organizations in Mexico and Bolivia. The objective of this article is to show the impact of the digital course on social entrepreneurship on the development of complex thinking skills of the workshop participants. The study was conducted using mixed methods, evaluating the perception of the performance levels of the participants and analyzing their opinions on the benefits brought by the platform. The results showed that (a) the level of performance in complex thinking competence improved after the formative experience, (b) the platform can be a convenient resource for training higher education students and lifelong learners, and (c) social entrepreneurship is a valuable topic to be trained with open educational resources. This study is a contribution to the transformative efforts made by developers of digital open educational resources and educators to build different approaches of competence for work training and social entrepreneurship skills development.