The pedagogy and practice of real estate anagement in Nigeria: entrepreneurial perspectives

In recent years, entrepreneurship education has become a prominent issue in the Nigerian education system. The learning and teaching of entrepreneurship in the country takes a top-down approach in which basic business start-up skills are taught to all students in a generic course irrespective of their specific disciplines. At the moment no consideration has been given to embedding entrepreneurial skills within the specific disciplines. This approach does not develop the learners' ability to become entrepreneurial in the context of the knowledge gained in the disciplines. The question of interest in this research therefore is: how should the teaching and learning of entrepreneurship improve the quality of graduates and ultimately enable them to become entrepreneurial in the practice of Real Estate Management (REM)? The research particularly examined the gaps in the learning, teaching, and assessment (LTA) of REM in six Nigerian universities, how the gaps in learning relate to gaps in practice, and the nature of curriculum innovations which will help to close the gaps. Consequently, the research uses a case study of a core REM course, Property Valuation, to demonstrate the curriculum innovations. The research adopts a mixed methodology to explore the associated research questions and objectives as follows: critical review of the literature to explore entrepreneurial ideas and some issues in entrepreneurship and learning-related concepts; critical analysis of documents on national and university curricula for REM education and professional standards; questionnaire survey of current LTA experiences and practices of REM academics, students and the opinions of REM practitioners about gaps in practice revealed by young REM graduates; focus group debate on the links among entrepreneurship, REM education and practice; and a case study to demonstrate the LTA innovations in a core REM course (Property Valuation). The data analysis procedures consist of frequency distributions of the observed responses to close-ended questionnaire items, descriptive statistics and hypotheses tests of the opinion scores related to the items, and qualitative discussion of the open-ended questionnaire items and transcript of the focus group debate. The research findings reveal the existence of key learning gaps in REM education, especially entrepreneurial learning gap associated with the ability to use disciplinary knowledge in problem solving in the society. Young graduates manifest these learning gaps in REM education in their employers’ organizations. Insights from the gaps in the learning and practice of REM were used to develop a new curriculum that will help to close the gaps, and the curriculum innovations were demonstrated in a case study of a core REM course (Property Valuation) across all levels of the REM curriculum. The thesis makes a major contribution to higher education research, pedagogy and practice in the sense that it is the first study that looks at embedding the learning of entrepreneurial skills into the REM curricula, across all levels of learning a core REM course. The entrepreneurial curriculum discussed in the case study can be adapted to other REM courses, different university courses in Nigeria and similar developing countries.