Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
LocationTroy, NY |
Classification4-year private research university |
StudentsFull-time: 6,449 | Part-time: 252 |
FacultyFull-time: 588 | Part-time: 91 |
The Story
Rensselaer's Office of Entrepreneurship is responsible for understanding, developing, and infusing entrepreneurial thought patterns and activities throughout Rensselaer's curricula. As a part of this charge, they continually look for opportunities to strengthen traditional entrepreneurship and business courses with embellished course content. In addition, they seek to enhance courses across the curriculum that can be complemented with entrepreneurial content - science and technology studies, product design and innovation, and engineering studios, just to name a few. However, one of the persistent challenges for this office is the identification and study of such courses without easy access to the content that is being delivered by the instructor, an issue that is further complicated by the fact that entrepreneurship can appear in virtually any course, from anthropology to zoology.
In the past, the office approached this problem by routinely crawling the course catalog for keywords like "product development" and "innovation", joining campus email distributions, and reaching out to departments and instructors to request their syllabi for review. The process was time consuming, required regular maintainence, and in many cases, did not provide the depth of information they were looking for. They also knew that some course opportunities were overlooked. It was then that they turned to Intellidemia.
By implementing Concourse, the Office of Entrepreneurship has been able to systematically catalog and organize course information in a central, online database. With instructors entering and maintaining their own syllabi, the office no longer needs to worry about locating and requesting them. Also, since users can search through and view an entire syllabus, they are no longer limited to the scope of the course description when identifying courses with entrepreneurial content. This unprecedented access to course information means the Office of Entrepreneurship can spend more time analyzing and supporting entrepreneurial courses than locating them.
As this structured syllabus repository expands, the Office of Entrepreneurship is now looking to dig even deeper by comparing and analyzing course offerings to demonstrate programmatic trends, uncover additional curricular opportunities, and showcase entrepreneurial teaching innovation and excellence. They also anticipate sharing their findings with outside organizations, such as the Kauffman Foundation.
Additional Content
Full Press Release - February 16th, 2010
About Rensselaer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is the nation’s oldest technological university. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering, the sciences, information technology, architecture, management, and the humanities and social sciences. Institute programs serve undergraduates, graduate students, and working professionals around the world. Rensselaer faculty are known for pre-eminence in research conducted in a wide range of fields, with particular emphasis in biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and the media arts and technology. The Institute is well known for its success in the transfer of technology from the laboratory to the marketplace so that new discoveries and inventions benefit human life, protect the environment, and strengthen economic development.
To learn more about Rensselaer, visit their website at http://rpi.edu.