Volkmar Mrass attends two courses at Harvard University

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 were part of the Harvard Summer School, the oldest academic summer program in the United States, which began in 1871 and was run by 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 in the department: among other things, he deals with the design and management of work systems in the context of crowdworking platforms.

Founded in 1636, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 is the richest university in the world with assets of USD 39.2 billion (2018). It has produced 48 Nobel Prize winners, 32 heads of state (including 8 US presidents) and 48 Pulitzer Prize winners. Harvard is also the place where several global companies from the information systems/IT sector have their roots: Bill Gates, for example, founded Microsoft in 1975 during his time as a Harvard student, and Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook here as a student in 2004.