One of the main goals of many educational courses at various colleges, especially those which focus on applied economics and management, is the development of students' entrepreneurship skills. It is usually accomplished through various project-oriented tasks. The development of the students' entrepreneurship skills is also the primary objective of the E-commerce course offered by our Faculty of Economics. This course combines theoretical knowledge and practical skills. Students work on a number of practical exercises with the aim to create a functional e-shop. They have to look for business opportunities, understand economic processes, work within a team, and be able to promote their ideas, strategies, and procedures. Finally, yet most importantly, they must not be afraid to present and defend their solutions. This study examines whether and to what extent this approach contributes to the development of skills which are usually associated with entrepreneurship. The exploration was performed based on students' evaluation. Means-end chain model and hierarchical value map approach were chosen as a research method. The results of this research show that entrepreneurship skills are being developed except for a motivation of students to accept a risky business competitive environment. However, the propensity to take risk is one of the basic traits of successful entrepreneurs. Our future effort will aim therefore at modifying our educational content. Greater emphasis will be placed on how to teach students to accept competitive environment which is risky and mostly unpredictable.
Cloud computing is a significant alternative in today's educational perspective. The technology gives the students and teachers the opportunity to quickly access various application platforms and resources through the web pages on-demand. Unfortunately, not all educational institutions often have an ability to take full advantages of the newest information technology. The paper analyzes possibilities of the cloud computing technology that can help educational institutions to support the process of teaching and learning.
There is also presented a cloud computing technology based solution introducing the MS Live@Edu environment as a means of communication and collaboration between lecturers and students. The authors have a successful experience of using MS Live@Edu during 3 academic years for delivering about 10 unique courses for approximately 700 students in Kaunas University of Technology (KTU). The use of MS Live@Edu environment for educational purposes is summarized by explaining the advantages of cloud computing gained both by lecturers and students.
In recent years a small number of web-based tools have been proposed to help students learn to write SQL query statements and also to assess students' SQL writing skills. SQLify is a new SQL teaching and assessment tool that extends the current state-of-the-art by incorporating peer review and enhanced automatic assessment based on database theory to produce more comprehensive feedback to students. SQLify (pronounced as squalify) is intended to yield a richer learning experience for students and reduce marking load for instructors. In this paper SQLify is compared with existing tools and important new features are demonstrated.