Teaching Entrepreneurial Communications Using Educational Platforms: Russian and Foreign Practices

Abstract

Entrepreneurial education today is the subject of close attention of the educational community. An important component of such training is the issue of entrepreneurial communication, which affects all aspects of the functioning of any business. External communications are aimed at ensuring the company’s business interaction with such stakeholders as customers, partners, competitors, government authorities, investors, while internal communications are aimed at improving the efficiency of business processes. Therefore teaching entrepreneurial communications is an urgent scientific and practical task. The relevance increases even more in the conditions of intensive development of ICT and especially in the context of the pandemic, when the educational process is moving to a large extent online. The purpose of this article is to provide an analytical review of Russian and foreign practices of teaching entrepreneurial communications on educational platforms. The article clarifies the concept of entrepreneurial communications and presents their consideration as a subject of study, it is shown that in the scientific literature there is no unity in the interpretation of this concept. In most sources it is replaced by the concept of “business communication”. A broad overview of business communications training courses on Russian and foreign educational platforms, such as Open Education, Skillbox, Netology, Product Live, Product Star, Laba, Yandex Practicum, Coursera, Udemy, EdX, MIT OCW, Alison, is presented. The largest number of business communications courses are presented on the Coursera, Udemy and Open Education platforms. The content of the identified courses is aimed at the formation of personal communicative competence in business interaction – the ability to negotiate, speak in public, etc., regardless of entrepreneurial specifics. The use of such methods of teaching entrepreneurial communications as hackathons, meetups, VR and AR technologies is substantiated. It is shown that the following applications can be used to develop entrepreneurial communication: VirtualSpeech, Glue, MeetinVR, Stage.