About Pop-Up Courses

What is a Pop-Up Course?

A pop-up course addresses the latest developments in academic fields and in society that have the potential to impact the personal, educational, and professional success of students and does so from multiple disciplinary lenses. The solutions to the major issues that confront society transcend disciplinary boundaries and require a diversity of approaches. Pop-up courses are designed to provide students with the opportunity to examine a topic of societal importance through multiple disciplinary lenses. Students and faculty in a pop-up course are from multiple academic disciplines and collaborate to examine “wicked” and “super-wicked” problems from diverse disciplinary views.

Pop-up courses provide faculty the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across disciplines to design and teach a course and the flexibility to quickly cover new developments that cross multiple disciplinary boundaries. Faculty can rapidly prototype by innovating and testing ideas in a pop-up format that may eventually become permanent parts of the curriculum.