Information and Communication Technologies for Development Graduate Minor

The inter-college graduate minor in ICT4D provides doctoral and master’s students with exposure to the multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological foundations of ICT4D and opportunities for scholarly engagement with communities of practice in the discipline. It will challenge students to simultaneously develop new concepts, theories, and methods for the study of ICT4D, and to apply this knowledge to socially relevant projects and programs.

The ICT4D Consortium will provide organizational support for the proposed graduate minor. The Consortium currently includes faculty from the Colleges of Agriculture, Business, Communication, and Information Sciences and Technology. Courses for the minor are drawn from these colleges, the College of Engineering and the School of International Affairs.

Admission Requirements

Students in any doctoral and master’s degree program at Penn State may enroll in the doctoral or master’s minor respectively with the consent of the student’s major adviser, the faculty coordinator of the ICT4D Consortium, and the Graduate School.

Minor Requirements

Requirements listed here are in addition to requirements for minors in Graduate Council policy GCAC-218 Minors.

The doctoral minor will require the completion of a minimum of 15 credits of integrated or articulated course work in information and communication technologies for development, related to but different from that of the student’s major, chosen from the list maintained by the Bellisario College of Communications, with a preponderance of courses at the 500 level. A minimum of 6 credits must be at the 500 level for the doctoral minor. At least 3 credits must be from information and communications technologies and at least 3 from development, as identified in the list of courses maintained by the Bellisario College of Communications. Official requests to add the minor to a doctoral candidate’s academic record must be submitted to Graduate Enrollment Services prior to establishment of the dissertation committee and prior to scheduling the comprehensive examination. At least one Graduate Faculty member from the minor field must serve on the candidate’s dissertation committee.

The master’s minor requires a minimum of 6 credits of integrated or articulated course work in information and communication technologies for development, related to but different from, that of the student’s major, chosen from the list maintained by the Bellisario College of Communications, with a preponderance of courses at the 500 level. A minimum of 3 credits must be at the 500 level for the master’s minor. At least 3 credits must be from information and communications technologies and at least 3 from development, as identified in the list of courses maintained by the Bellisario College of Communications.

A list of courses approved to count towards this minor is maintained by the Bellisario College of Communications. Note: A competitive enrollment process might be instituted for any course or sequence of courses for which there is significant enrollment demand from the ICT4D minor, beyond the capacity of the offering College/School to fulfill.

Courses

Graduate courses carry numbers from 500 to 699 and 800 to 899. Advanced undergraduate courses numbered between 400 and 499 may be used to meet some graduate degree requirements when taken by graduate students. Courses below the 400 level may not. A graduate student may register for or audit these courses in order to make up deficiencies or to fill in gaps in previous education but not to meet requirements for an advanced degree.

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