“Music Industry 101,” “Investing in the Arts” and “Talent Management for Entertainment” are just a few of the courses that students want to take but are currently not offered in the Wharton curriculum.
These are three of the many course suggestions currently listed on DueCourse, a Management 104 project that has created a website that allows Wharton students to suggest courses that faculty members could teach.
The site, which launched almost two weeks ago, allows any student with a Wharton email account to sign up and submit course suggestions. Users can also vote on other people’s suggestions as a way for professors to see how popular a course idea would be.
Related: Wharton to feature core courses on Coursera
A group of six Wharton students, Evan Booker, Bryan Yamhure-Sepulveda, Kyle Hutchison, Pranav Maganti, Maxine Winston and Hunter Horsley, came together to create DueCourse for MGMT 104, which requires students to create a social movement project that enacts change at the University.
Currently, the process of creating a Wharton course has limited student input, according to management professor Daniel Raff. Professors first come up with an idea for a new course and then create and submit a proposed syllabus for the course. From there, the proposal travels through a chain of committees — from department to school-wide to standing faculty committees — that must approve the course before it enters a two-year experimental period.
At the end of the experimental period, the course is once again reevaluated to determine whether or not it should remain in the curriculum.
“There isn’t at the moment a systematic channel for conveying course ideas specifically to faculty who might be interested in developing such courses,” Raff said. DueCourse, he said, would assist the flow of ideas.
“Related: Penn Course Review may see updated course info”: http://www.thedp.com/r/dfd50c5f
Horsley, a junior who worked on the project, tried to see if it was possible to start a course on marketing for startups. He met with several professors to learn about the process of creating a course and to see if it was possible to find a professor to teach the course that he wanted to take.
“It should be possible for anyone to do this, and they shouldn’t have to sit down with a professor for an hour to get their idea out,” Horsley said.
After hearing about Horsley’s experience, the group decided to create a way for students to suggest courses.
Related: Websites help students enroll in closed courses
The site is currently open to Wharton students only, but team members hope that this is something that Penn’s other schools will adopt as well.
“We want students to be more invested in their education,” Wharton junior Yamhure-Sepulveda said. “Instead of picking from the options that are there, we want students to introduce a new option that might be valuable to them.”
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