Last year, the MIS department began previewing several redesigned courses, and this fall the new curriculum has been officially rolled out in full. The introductory course, Digital Systems, teaches basic programming skills to all business students, regardless of major. It’s a new approach that will give Fox students a competitive edge after graduation.

“There’s been a push that MBAs should know how to code, and we’re bringing that thinking to our undergradates,” says David Schuff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Information Systems. “Some other business school programs start with basic computer literacy, but we’re asking, ‘What’s the next generation of tools and skills?’”

Digital Systems provides an overview of how businesses use technology in today’s economy. The first two-thirds of the course help students get a grasp of the big ideas in an active learning environment. Through hands-on, in-class assignments, students practice applying the concepts they’re learning, including programming.

“It represents a shift from a project-management focus to a product-management focus,” says Schuff.

During the final third of the course, students learn to code using JavaScript to build a digital product of their own. Their final project challenges students to make a tool that can rank potential investors in a fictional firm in terms of various functions like income, assets, and debt. “Their job is to write those functions,” says Steven Sclarow, Assistant Professor of MIS and the course coordinator.

“In the past, coding assignments taught concepts without putting the business perspective on it,” says Sclarow. “Our approach uses an overarching narrative throughout the course to help students see how it relates to them and digital product management,” he says.

The prospect can be daunting for some students, especially outside MIS, but completing the project gives them not only important new skills, but also confidence. And for MIS students, this introduction prepares them expertly for what’s to come: more advanced courses on API-based software development, user experience, and cybersecurity.

“The new Digital Systems course is the latest example of how Temple’s MIS department prepares students for the workforce,” says Bruce Fadem, chair of the IT Advisory Board and retired VP and CIO of Wyeth.

“All business students are going to encounter digital systems, no matter what job they have,” says Sclarow. And Schuff emphasizes this point: “If you’re in accounting or finance, you might have a need to do process automation. In marketing, you might need to manipulate data to do analyses. Programming is becoming an essential tool to do these things yourself.”

This semester, the MIS major introduces exciting new content to prepare students for the emerging API economy. A three-course series emphases application development and cloud software deployment, enhancing learning while building skills and confidence. “This sequence emphasizes the interconnectedness of the information. Now it’s not like three 15-week courses, it’s like a single 45-week course that goes from one semester to the next,” says professor Jeremy Shafer, who teaches both the first and third courses in the series.

The first course introduces cloud application programming and JavaScript, but it provides a more holistic view than typical JavaScript classes. This course introduces the idea that a programmer can reach into the cloud for an API and use it in the application at hand. “There’s the code you write, and then there are the resources out there in the cloud for you to bring in and leverage,” says Shafer.

The second course explores networking basics and cloud platforms. “We teach them how to build a very simple API and deploy it on the infrastructure they build,” says David Schuff, professor and chair of the MIS Department, who teaches a section of this course.

Professor Mart Doyle also teaches this second course. “But it’s in the third course that students really bring everything together,” says Doyle. “In the final course, we write an API from scratch. If you understand both halves of the process, and you can put your own API endpoint out in the cloud, there’s nothing you can’t build,” says Shafer.

One powerful shift that separates the Fox School from a typical MIS curriculum is the use of JavaScript across the sequence. “If you use a different computer language in every course, you spend a lot of instructional time just getting used to the language. By investing in one language across the three courses, we give introductory instruction once and build on it,” says Shafer.

A focus on the API economy also unifies this series. Modern businesses mix and match APIs with their own custom-coded tools to solve problems. “It’s no longer a choice between building it all from scratch or buying something out of the box,” says Schuff. Through this series, students learn the end-to-end process. “They learn the business thinking behind it,” says Schuff.

This sequence gives students a number of advantages after graduation. “Our students can have an insightful conversation about how to leverage the cloud to deploy APIs and how to design an application that scales,” says Doyle.

“Students who go through this sequence are coming away with something that will set them apart from their peers from other schools,” says Shafer. “Not everyone is being as aggressive as we are at conveying these ideas.”