Integrating the Core: A New Management Curriculum to Empower Our Students

This paper follows Kennesaw State's University's (KSU) faculty journey in developing a new integrated core curriculum for their Management majors that will empower the students and meet the needs of today's employers. Curriculums must change to stay current. Depending on the amount of change, this can be a huge undertaking for a department ensconced in an existing curriculum paradigm, and can be met with resistance. In this paper we look for answers to: 1) Why is the change necessary? 2) What are we changing to? We will follow up with some thoughts about 3) how will we make these changes? Our paper begins by defining the conceptual foundations for the Management core curriculum, followed by a look into the curriculum change process, and concludes with our eight-stage method used in developing the core curriculum model. We define four key thematic objectives that are integral to each of the core courses. The paper concludes with descriptions of our courses--Managing Organizations, Managing People, Managing Projects, Managing Your Company, and Managing Globally, and the associated integrated course sequencing. The four new courses all require field application, are integrative in nature, were developed collaboratively, and the sequence proceeds conceptually from macro to micro and back to macro in orientation. All four will meet both the requirements of face-to-face and on-line delivery.