Innovation in Information Systems Education-IV Mutual Fund Management Information System: An Integrated Project for the Introduction to MIS Course

Business students often find it difficult to understand the relevance of the traditional core MIS course taught as part of most business curricula. To address this problem, we made several changes to how we teach IS to business students. One of those changes consists of using crosscourse projects that require the application of IS tools and concepts. This article explains one such project that is jointly assigned in an IS course and in a Finance course. In this project, students apply their understanding of financial markets and investments by selecting a set of company stocks that they then manage as a mutual fund. They must build an information system both to track their fund performance and to allow entering of buy and sell transactions. The project is popular among the students, and it reinforces numerous IS concepts and skills.