Adding Value to the Core Business Curriculum: Innovative Use of IS Courses

Over the past few years, our institution has been in the process of rethinking the structure of our College of Business curriculum. This is motivated by three major factors: Demands of industry for the inclusion of “soft skills” in our curriculum, the recent emphasis by AACSB on assessment of student learning, and dissatisfaction with the performance of the core MIS course. This paper describes our response to those pressures: a pilot curriculum that emphasizes skill development and assessment, content integration, and information technology concepts and use. Although early in the delivery of this new curriculum, preliminary results indicate that this newly structured curriculum effectively delivers MIS/IT content while simultaneously building students’ soft skills. The remainder of this paper briefly describes the motivation for the changes, the structure of the new curriculum, and anecdotal evidence of the new program’s effectiveness.