Wharton’s Social Entrepreneurship MOOC to Begin September 8

Image via Flickr user neverbutterfly

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business will launch a Coursera course on Social Entrepreneurship on September 8. Peter Frumpkin, the faculty director at the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, along with Wharton professors Ian MacMillan and James Thompson, will teach the six-week course.

The Ivy League school is just one of a number of universities across the country that is offering its classes through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are available through platforms such as Coursera, Udacity and Edx.

The course was created, in part, so that the material covered was more accessible to those around the world regardless of income.

Frumpkin told Generocity last November that his idea was to “open up this field to thousands of people instead of the small group that can afford the Penn classes.” The course had originally been scheduled for earlier this year, but the date was pushed back to September 8.

In the course, participants from around the world will learn how to:

• Launch social entrepreneurship projects which have high-potential of significant positive social impact
• Direct energy and limited resources to efficiently launching those projects with the most promise
• Apply tools and frameworks to testing and scaling your own social enterprise

There will be two tracks in the course: the first is the open track (which is free) in which participants do assignments given to them by the instructors based on cases and problems in the world. The work done on these assignments will be assessed by other students in the course.

The second option is the Signature Track. Participants in this track will bring their own social entrepreneurship project to the course and apply the assignments to their projects. Participants work in this track will be assessed by teaching assistants (TA’s) at Wharton and Penn. The fee for the Signature Track is $49.

Students in the Signature Track who complete the course at a high level will be eligible to apply for a full scholarship to the Penn Social Impact House — a mountain retreat in the U.S. where 20 of the best emerging social entrepreneurs from around the world gather in a live-work environment for two weeks under the guidance of leading experts and practitioners to work on the development of their ideas.

Find out more information (and to sign up for the course)  at Coursera.