Wharton Executive Education offers online metaverse course

If taxi drivers offering stock tips typically presages the end of a cycle, Wharton Business School offering courseware likely marks the start.

Ivy league college the University of Pennsylvania is launching a six-week online metaverse course through its Wharton Executive Education arm.

The course, Business in the Metaverse will run from September 12 to November 6, making it the first Ivy League certificate program on the metaverse.

According to the university, the program was developed in collaboration with Prysm Group, an economic consulting firm specialising in blockchain, digital assets, and the metaverse.

It features lectures, case studies, and immersive activities through which participants will gain a deep understanding of metaverse technology and business opportunities.

Cathy Barrera, the program industry lead and founding economist at Prysm Group said, “Often with emerging technologies, there is a lot of hype around how those technologies will impact the way people live and work.

“This course is catered to executives to help them determine how adopting these technologies can add value to their businesses.”

The program’s academic director, Kevin Werbach, the Liem Sioe Liong/First Pacific Company Professor and chair of the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School, gives three takeaways about the course.

First, while metaverse technologies do not yet fully realise the maximalist visions put forward by Meta and others, they are already here and being adopted for a variety of applications.

Second, the course brings together faculty across several business disciplines to examine how these new technologies are reshaping various aspects of markets and management.

And lastly, business leaders need to understand metaverse technologies so they can make decisions that will keep their organisations competitive.

To understand these developments, the course draws on the expertise of six Wharton faculty from four departments: operations, information and decisions; management; marketing; and legal studies and business ethics.

The program features six industry case studies, more than 50 lecture videos, and a dozen industry experts offering a wide variety of perspectives, including discussions of the dangers and limitations of the metaverse.

It aims to allow students to align theory with practice and give them the tools necessary to engage deeply in a business context with the emerging technologies empowering the metaverse.