From June to August 2019, Volkmar Mrass, research associate at the Department of Information Systems at the University of Kassel, attended two courses relevant to his research at Harvard University in Cambridge/Massachusetts (USA). These took place within the framework of the Harvard Summer School, the oldest academic summer program in the United States, started in 1871, and were the responsibility of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. The two graduate-credit courses, "Big Ideas, Great Thinkers" and "The Art and Practice of Systems Thinking," offered content related to Volkmar Mrass' work at the department: among other things, he studies the design and management of work systems in the context of crowdworking platforms.

Harvard University in Cambridge/Massachusetts, founded in 1636, is the oldest university in the USA. It is No. 1 in many international university rankings, for example in the"Shanghai Ranking" or"Times Higher Education (THE)" Reputation Ranking and with assets of 39.2 billion US dollars (2018), it is the richest university in the world. It has produced, among others, 48 Nobel laureates, 32 heads of state (including 8 U.S. presidents), and also 48 Pulitzer Prize winners. Harvard is also where some world information systems/IT companies have their roots: Bill Gates, for example, founded Microsoft in 1975 while a Harvard student, and Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook here in 2004 while a student.