Academics

Digital transformations are addressed, to different extents, in many of the courses taken by students at the Undergraduate College. In particular, during the pre-semester orientation for first-year Bachelor’s students, all Undergraduate College students take a module on AI (lasting 10 hours at regional campuses and 12 hours in Paris).

For those who wish to deepen their understanding of digital issues, the University College offers an interdisciplinary dual degree that combines courses in mathematics, the humanities, and the social sciences: the Bachelor of Arts and Sciences, “Algorithms and Decision-Making,” in partnership with the Mathematics Department at the University of Paris Cité. The main focus of this program is the ways in which our choices—whether individual or collective—are shaped, guided, and sometimes constrained by models and/or sets of instructions that draw on both logic and our everyday lives.

A key component of the core curriculum of the Master’s degree offered by the School of Management and Impact includes Data & Digital Courses articulated around 3 thematic spheres: digital and social sciences; tools, data and analysis; and management tools. The objective of these courses is to:

• Train students (with methods ranging from refresher courses to advanced training) to "speak data", to develop autonomous digital usage and to master the fundamental logical and quantitative elements of data and digital technology
• Enable students to develop a critical mindset with regard to the societal, ethical, legal, strategic and economic challenges of digital and data
• Provide students with professional tools and methods that will be useful for their entry into the job market

EMI also hosts a double degree program with Télécom Paris, which allows students to develop skills and expertise in both management and finance, as well as engineering and digital technologies. Learn more about the programme here (in FR).

The Policy Stream: Digital, New Technology and Public Policy proposed by the School of Public Affairs is a unique interdisciplinary programme which allows students to explore all the facets of the digital revolution in public policy.

The School of Public Affairs also runs the Public Policy Incubator, an innovative educational program designed to train students to creatively and collaboratively solve real-world public policy problems.

Within the Master in Economic Law, the Law School offers a specialization in Innovation Law (FR).

The Law School also proposes the DIGILAW Clinic, whose objective is to train and work with law students to find concrete solutions to practical problems: 

• How can the values and rights needed to sustain democracies and the common good be upheld and ensured in our digital world?
• What is the role of the law in this environment where technologies, infrastructures, big players and users themselves construct normativities beyond the law itself?

DIGILAW involves teams of students and researchers working on action-research projects addressing these issues, designed in collaboration with a range of partners from civil society, public institutions and private actors.

Teaching digital journalism is crucial to the Journalism School. No matter what media students work on (radio, TV, Internet, newspaper), they learn about how to master all the tools and uses of the network to produce desktop and mobile content, including digital culture, data investigation, online editing, live blogging and fact checking, engagement with the audience, video and pictures editing, social media investigations, etc. 

As a part of the Master of Journalism, as soon as they start their first year, students are immersed in digital technologies. A whole range of intensive classes, courses and professional workshops give them the opportunity to acquire the specific abilities applying to digital journalism.

In 2026, the Journalism School launched the Master in Investigations, Analysis and Information Integrity, which trains students in risk analysis, online investigation, and strategic monitoring. 

The School of Research offers inter-semester courses for doctoral and masters students from different disciplines on digital skills for research (ex. online data collection, webscraping, text-as-data, etc.)

Technology is an area of growing strategic importance to international affairs and a cross-cutting issue that can be applied to examine major global challenges including security, climate change or energy among others. Technology drives innovation, improves efficiency, and enhances connectivity and human exchange at a global scale, but also presents fundamental concerns and ethical dilemmas for our societies, our economies, and our forms of governance and citizenship.

The Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) has launched a new Master in Technology and Global Affairs in order to prepare students for the digital transition. The programme aims to train students to better understand how artificial intelligence, big data, and cyber security tools work. It also encourages them to explore and analyse the influence of technology on the international order and how it can be effectively governed. In addition, PSIA also hosts the Technology and Global Affairs Innovation Hub, which is designed to leverage knowledge towards impact and solutions to address tech-related global challenges.

The Group Projects of the Lab are at the heart of the curriculum for all master’s programs at the Urban School. Through this unique and highly career-oriented module, students address a real-world territorial challenge posed by a public, private, or nonprofit organization. For 9 months, a team of 4 to 5 students works under the supervision of an academic or professional mentor. Each project concludes with a presentation of the final deliverable to the partner and during the Urban School's Open House in June of each year. A written report is also produced, and innovative formats are sometimes proposed, such as an exhibition, a video, or a public presentation of results.

The Urban School is committed to addressing all the challenges that contemporary societies may face in cities and regions, including the accumulation of data and technologies.

Since 2025, the Urban School has also offered a bilingual introductory workshop on data visualization, designed in partnership with the OFCE and the médialab, and with support from the Open Institute for Digital Transformations and the TIERED project. Held over three days before the start of the M2 semester, this workshop aims to introduce students to the fundamentals of visual data representation, an essential tool for analyzing and understanding urban dynamics. Divided into groups, students work with datasets provided by the OFCE and use software and data analysis methods to produce a series of visualizations of their chosen city based on various themes.