Students as Partners

At Kellogg, students participate as partners in driving change in the curriculum. Reflecting this emphasis on student participation in curriculum development, some of the school's most popular classes were instituted or inspired by the students themselves. The Global Initiatives in Management course, for example, was started in 1990 by a group of students who wanted to study business in what was then the Soviet Union. Since that time, each year approximately 300 students have traveled to 15 countries, exploring topics from ecotourism in Central America, to entry strategies for Chinese markets.

Photo © Nathan Mandell
"As director of the Kellogg Teams and Groups Center, I am devoted to understanding how to develop leaders and teams to reach their highest level of performance. My research investigates how managers and executives can best apply concepts from the classroom in their real-world business situations. In a complementary fashion, we are interested in how the classroom can be used as a testbed for organizational challenges." J. Jay Gerber Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution & Organizations Leigh Thompson

Similarly, the TechVenture initiative began in 1998. In this course, students learn to address current issues in technology and e-commerce, completing the class with a visit to Silicon Valley. During the visit, students meet with various business leaders and visionaries and work on projects pertaining to the evolution of e-commerce and its economic impact. This research is then compiled and published every year in an anthology.

The Learning through Experience and Action Program (or LEAP) was also proposed by a student who wanted to obtain more hands-on experience addressing business issues. The resulting course allows students to help solve real-world management problems at client companies. Another new class, Nonprofit Entrepreneurship, was proposed by a group of Kellogg students last spring and is being introduced into the curriculum this spring.

In addition, students played a strong role in creating the Real Options course, a class that expands understanding of valuation. After completing an advanced finance class, the students demonstrated a desire to learn even more and so approached the school's administration with a plan to co-develop a new course to meet their needs. Starting without benefit of a textbook or case study, students committed their independent study hours to working closely with Kellogg faculty to develop Real Options. Because of this student interest and initiative, a course that did not exist in December was ready to be added to the curriculum by March.

Student enthusiasm helps drive and shape many Kellogg course offerings, even when the students themselves do not actually initiate the idea for the class. One example of how this dynamism impacts the curriculum can be seen in Spreadsheet Modeling for Business Decisions. This course focuses on setting up and analyzing managerial decision problems on the spreadsheet platform, addressing such elements as resource allocation, risk analysis, decision analysis, data analysis and forecasting. Students have embraced the class, in part, because the spreadsheet format allows not only for a hands-on classroom experience, but also enables students to learn mathematically advanced material in an intuitive manner.

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