Online Support for Education

Online Support for Education in Entrepreneurial Competences: An Assessment Tool and Support for Tailor-Made Training

Five searchers (Jaume Teodoro, Ester Bernadó, Florian Bratzke, Anita Zehrer and Wouter Van Bockhaven) highlight the interest of entrepreneurship education. They describe an online platform —named EICAA —that will support educators and trainers aiming at teaching/guiding/coaching students or employees in developing entre/intrapreneurial competences.

Already used in five universities and open to any other higher education institution or organisation, the platform defines 18 key competences grouped in three areas.

EICAA stands for Entrepreneurial (and Intrapreneurial) Competences Assessment Alliance and is being developed under an Erasmus+ project (funding by European Commission). In short, the EICAA provides a revised entrepreneur-ship competence framework, a self-assessment survey for students or employees, and a competence development kit.

The first (beta version) of the platform is expected by the end of 2022. Once publicly accessible, the platform will be licensed under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL-1.2)

However, the licensors were still not willing to licence the platform entirely as open source, as this would allow the commercialisation of its code by externals. So they plan to make use of the “commons clause” which serves as a legal wrapper text to the EUPL and turns the EICAA Digital Platform into a source-available solution. In their opinion, the prevention of commercialisation of open-source code appears to be an unsolved issue given that there seems to be no ideal licencing model yet strong enough to prevent such a scenario.

It is well known that no open source / free software organisation (in fact, OSI and the FSF, both impacted by US business culture) ever wanted to create barriers for commercial use of licensed programs. Their definitions ban such discrimination, and they are not at all afraid by any commercial scenario. “Make money if you can” they said, knowing that when the original licensor provides software for free, commercial stakeholders reusing and re-distributing it should provide a real added value to justify their price. If this added value is based on services (implementation, integration, training, provision of support, vendors’ guarantee), there is no reason to worry. If the added value is based on the distribution of software improvements or extensions, the EUPL – which is a copyleft licence – imposes that such re-distribution of “derivative works” must be licensed also under the EUPL conditions, meaning that the “re-licensor” must provide “a repository where the modified Source Code is easily and freely available” EUPL article 5 states. Therefore the fear of a commercial scenario looks over evaluated.

More information in the article published on the ResearchGate platform.