• Energy Research

Social entrepreneurship is an underrated subject in the field of sports. For Romanian society, the fall of communism opened up new opportunities in the entrepreneurial domain. At the same time, entrepreneurship began to intersect with sports, and the results were often productive. Sport is seen as a domain that could inspire entrepreneurship through its principles. The similarities between these two fields have created the perspective of common action in sport and entrepreneurship, and this coexistence has improved during times of social change. After 1989, Romania was confronted with many challenges at the societal level, and sport offered a way to address and to tackle social problems. Through sport, some athletes decided to contribute to issues of individuals or communities. They assumed the status of a social entrepreneur, and developed activities that could inspire others. This paper intends to gather examples of such social entrepreneurship from Romania, and to identify the elements that lead to success. The research takes into consideration case studies from various domains, and this diversity helps us to better understand the challenges of Romanian sport when it interacts with social entrepreneurship.

The authors would like to make the following corrections to their published paper [...]

This paper examines how the corruption heritage of South-Eastern European sport can be used as content for educational strategies designed to improve the ethics and integrity in today’s sport. Hidden or dark history is useful when considering an education for a sustainable development approach to improving athletes’ moral skills. In education, examining mistakes can be a useful tool for preventing their recurrence as they provide examples for study and content for evidence-based learning. At the same time, it is a useful process, aiming to develop critical thinking and the decision-making skills in the area of sports. This paper provides examples on how narratives can be used in the field of sport moral education and what patterns reflecting the lack of integrity in sport can be identified. Because it has perpetuated and altered the image and principles of sports competition, diminishing trust in sport sustainability, it is important to identify how this effect can be approached from the perspective of the education for sustainable development (ESD), as applied to the area of sports. However, it is essential that sports integrity be valued by society and that all sports actors (athletes, coaches, officials) promote ethics and fair play.

In the pandemic context, creating IoT-enriched learner-centered environments was not only a tendency but a requirement for sustainable teaching and learning in universities with sports science programs for theoretical classes and practical activities. Our study aims to assess both the extent to which the sports science academic environment has been prepared for online teaching and the key features of dedicated e-learning teaching and training in sports science to provide the highest-quality educational services in pandemic conditions. An online survey was administered to academic staff in the field of sports science from two Romanian universities. The results of the study reveal that online teaching has been associated with major changes in terms of methods and methodology, but also with a new dynamic of external and internal factors regarding teachers and their relationship with students. At the same time, it depends on a solid specific infrastructure and IoT facilities (MOOCs, VR/AR, mobile devices). As a mirror of the student-centered approach, universities in the field of sports science have experienced the same concerns about the outcomes of the educational process. In this regard, universities can become sustainable if they positively integrate e-learning into their teaching system and consolidate their quality standards from an e-learning perspective.