Online courses directory (10358)

This course focuses on some of the important current issues in strategic management. It will concentrate on modern analytical approaches and on enduring successful strategic practices. It is consciously designed with a technological and global outlook since this orientation in many ways highlights the significant emerging trends in strategic management. The course is intended to provide the students with a pragmatic approach that will guide the formulation and implementation of corporate, business, and functional strategies.

This course is intended to be an extension of course 15.902, Strategic Management I, with the purpose of allowing the students to experience an in-depth application of the concepts and frameworks of strategic management. Throughout the course, Prof. Arnoldo Hax will discuss the appropriate methodologies, concepts, and tools pertinent to strategic analyses and will illustrate their use by discussing many applications in real-life settings, drawn from his own personal experiences.

This course provides an overview of key concepts in strategic management in the construction, real estate, and architecture industries. Topics include supply chain analysis, market segmentation, vertical integration, competitive advantage, and industry transformation. This course is of interest to students seeking more understanding of the business dynamics of real estate and construction; seeking to provide value in firms which they may join; or seeking to build a foundation for their own entrepreneurial pursuits.

Help your organization survive, drive, and thrive on fundamental technological changes in your industry. This advanced strategic management course helps you translate strategic insights into smart strategic decisions on positioning, partnering and being socially responsible.

1. Positioning the Firm:

• How can strategy portfolios guide corporate strategy and help decision-makers scope the activities of their organization?
• How can general strategies help organizations gain competitive advantages in their industries?
• How can organizations make competition irrelevant and create uncontested market space?

2. Orchestrating Strategic Alliances:

• What is the case for cooperative strategy? When should we move from a competitive to a cooperative mindset?
• What are strategic alliances and what is their payoff?
• How can firms build and orchestrate collaborative ecosystems to enhance their (innovative) performance?

3. Embracing Social Responsibility:

• What is the role of business in society? How do organizations contribute and cause harm to the public good?
• What exactly are the social responsibilities of organizations?
• To whom are they responsible and for what? Why should they care?
• How can ethics inform strategic decisions? How can we encourage ethical behavior and reconcile responsibility and profitability? 

All key ideas are illustrated through a case study on Tesla and its role in the technological transformation of the global automotive industry.

This course is part of the "Managing Technology & Innovation: How to deal with disruptive change" MicroMasters program designed to teach the critical skills needed to be successful in this exciting field. In order to qualify for the MicroMasters Credential, you will need to earn a Verified Certificate in each of the six courses of the RWTHx MicroMasters program.

Engage in rigorous strategic analysis to complement your intuition with the deep insights needed to help your organization prosper in times of transition. This foundational course enables you to design effective strategy processes, spot fundamental market and technology changes in your industry and renew your organization’s internal resource base.

1. Unpacking the Process of Strategy:

• What precisely is strategy and why does it matter? What are the origins of the concept and how can we define it?
• What are the building blocks of strategy and how can they be arranged as a process?
• What distinct conceptions of the strategy process co-exist and what are their respective advantages and disadvantages?

2. Analyzing Industry Structures:

• What is the role of the industry and its structure for firm performance? How can we analyze industry structures?
• How can we unpack industries and identify the most attractive strategic positions to occupy therein?
• How do we identify what it takes to outcompete others in our strategic group?

3. Developing Internal Resources:

• Can firms succeed in generally unattractive industries? What is the role of firms’ internal resource base in this regard?
• How can we find out which resources and capabilities are likely to have the greatest strategic value?
• What are dynamic capabilities and how do they matter for firm survival and performance?

All key ideas are illustrated through a real-life case study on Tesla and its role in the technological transformation of the global automotive industry. 

This course is part of the "Managing Technology & Innovation: How to deal with disruptive change" MicroMasters program designed to teach the critical skills needed to be successful in this exciting field. In order to qualify for the MicroMasters Credential, you will need to earn a Verified Certificate in each of the six courses of the RWTHx MicroMasters program.

Marketing research may be divided into methods that emphasize understanding "the customer" and methods that emphasize understanding "the market." This course (15.822) deals with the market. The companion course (15.821) deals with the customer.

The course will teach you how to write, conduct and analyze a marketing research survey. The emphasis will be on discovering market structure and segmentation, but you can pursue other project applications.

A major objective of the course is to give you some "hands-on" exposure to analysis techniques that are widely used in consulting and marketing research factor analysis, perceptual mapping, conjoint, and cluster analysis). These techniques used to be considered advanced but now involve just a few keystrokes on most stat software packages.

The course assumes familiarity with basic probability, statistics, and multiple linear regression.

15.320 Strategic Organizational Design focuses on effective organizational design in both traditional and innovative organizations, with special emphasis on innovative organizational forms that can provide strategic advantage. Topics include when to use functional, divisional, or matrix organizations, how IT creates new organizational possibilities, and examples of innovative organizational possibilities, such as democratic decision-making, crowd-based organizations, internal resource markets, and other forms of collective intelligence. Team projects include inventing new possibilities for real organizations.

This is an advanced course in game theory. We begin with a rigorous overview of the main equilibrium concepts for non-­cooperative games in both static and dynamic settings with either complete or incomplete information. We define and explore properties of iterated strict dominance, rationalizability, Nash equilibrium, subgame perfection, sequential, perfect and proper equilibria, the intuitive criterion, and iterated weak dominance. We discuss applications to auctions, bargaining, and repeated games. Then we introduce solution concepts for cooperative games and study non-­cooperative implementations. Other topics include matching theory and networks.
 

Increasing concerns about the state of our planet have catapulted sustainability issues from the corporate backburner to the boardroom. Consequently, corporate sustainability initiatives have flourished, driven by a desire to minimize costs and risks, maximize opportunities and enhance reputation.

What does sustainability mean in the business context? Why has it captured so much attention from academics as well as corporate leaders? How can businesses manage emerging sustainability challenges without compromising their core advantages, and transform themselves into 'sustainable enterprises'?

This course explores the emerging relationships between sustainability issues and competitive advantage. Building on the basic concepts of strategic management, this course will explore how managers may effectively deal with the sustainability challenges that they now encounter.

By encouraging you to reflect on these issues using multiple case studies, discussions and interviews, we will aim to enhance your understanding of alternative models of strategy development in the context of sustainable development.

Tien Tzuo, Chief Strategy Officer for Salesforce.com, believes that investments are shifting from direct-marketing campa

Achieve higher performance and efficiency within any organization and also become a significantly better manager

This course provides an overview of the musical styles and techniques developed over the past 115 years. The anthology and supplemental listening will present a range of art music aesthetics in a variety of genres such as chamber music, symphonic and choral music, and opera. While tuning your ears to novel sounds, you will hone your own preferences and aim to understand the motivations behind and importance of a wide diversity of compositional orientations, including Expressionism, Impressionism, atonality, neo-Classicism, serialism, nationalism, the influence of jazz and popular idioms, post-tonality, electronic music, aleatory, performance art, post-modernism, minimalism, spectralism, the New Complexity, neo-Romanticism, and post-minimalism.

Too much mathematical rigor teaches rigor mortis: the fear of making an unjustified leap even when it lands on a correct result. Instead of paralysis, have courage: Shoot first and ask questions later. Although unwise as public policy, it is a valuable problem-solving philosophy and the theme of this course: how to guess answers without a proof or an exact calculation, in order to develop insight.

You will learn this skill by mastering six reasoning tools---dimensional analysis, easy cases, lumping, pictorial reasoning, taking out the big part, and analogy. The applications will include mental calculation, estimating population growth rates, understanding drag without differential equations, singing musical intervals to estimate logarithms, approximating integrals, summing infinite series, and turning differential equations into algebra.

Your learning will be supported by regular readings that you discuss with other students, by short tablet videos, by quick problems to help you check your understanding, by weekly homework problems, review and and a final exam. You will work hard, and, by the end of the course, have learned a rough-and-ready approach to using mathematics to understand the world.

All required readings are available within the courseware, courtesy of The MIT Press. A print version of the course textbook, Street-Fighting Math, is also available for purchase. The MIT Press is offering enrolled students a special 30% discount on books ordered directly through the publisher’s website. To take advantage of this offer, please use promotion code SFM30 at The MIT Press. 

FAQ

• Do I need to buy a textbook?
  • Back in 2010, MIT Press agreed to publish the textbook, *Street-Fighting Mathematics*, under a free license (in print and online).
  • Thus, the book is legally available all over the internet, including on this course platform.
  • As a registered student in this course, you can also purchase a printed book from MIT Press at a discount.
• Do you often get into street fights?
  • The last time was in high school, when I was attacked for being “different” and suspended for fighting back.
  • However, in my problem-solving fights (and now that I’m older!), I regularly use reasoning tools and we’ll do the same in this course.

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.) This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.

In this free course Stress Management - Dealing with Personal Stress you will be introduced to stress mapping and how to sensitize yourself to potential stressors in the environment. You will learn mays to manage your own stress such as writing a stress journal and analysing your own personal stress. Learning how to react with your own stressors will help you to cope more efficiently with stress and this course could help you to avoid stressful situations altogether.<br /><br />This course will also inform you on the difference between internal and external locus of control. You will be able to assess whether you have an internal or external locus of control and how this affects the decisions you make. <br /><br />Next, you will learn how to differentiate between stress and anxiety. You will learn how behaviours are related to anxious thoughts and how to manage these thoughts. You will also learn about assertiveness and how your reaction to different situations can be seen as aggressive or passive. This course will complete by informing you why addressing your stress will help you to overcome your stressors. <br /><br />This course will be of great interest to all learners who would like to learn techniques for dealing with personal stress.

In this free course Stress Management – How Stress Affects Your Health you will learn about the different ways stress can affect your health. You will learn about the nervous system and how it induces stress and how the brain responds during a stressful situation. You will also learn how stress affects different organs. <br /><br />The course begins be explaining disorders that can be caused by stress and the symptoms to look out for. You will learn about the different parts of the brain and which of these parts are triggered by stress. You will also learn the role of the endocrine system during a stressful period and be able to explain how stress can have a number of effects on the immune system. <br /><br />The second module will delve into the psychiatric disorders that are associated with stress. You will be given real-life examples to help you further understand the effects of stress and explain how the immune system’s ability to fight of antigens is reduced when you are stressed. <br />This course is suitable for anyone wishing to learn more about how stress can be caused and how we respond to it. <br /><br />This free Alison course would suit students studying science and how the brain works or psychology. <br />

In this free course Stress Management – Techniques for Coping with Stress you will learn about coping strategies that are helpful for managing stress and you will learn how to develop positive coping strategies. <br /><br />The course begins by introducing you to different types of coping strategies and explains how coping strategies differ from one individual to the next. You will learn about the difference between adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies. You will also learn about the difference between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies, and how to implement relaxation techniques to help you cope with stress. <br /><br />Next, you will learn how to use exercise to reduce stress. You will learn about the relationship between the brain and exercise, and the positive, long-term effects exercise can have on your health. The course will finish by informing you on how to create your own DIY program that will help you to identify stressors in your life.<br /><br />This course will be of great interest to all learners who would like to learn techniques for dealing with personal stress. <br />

This economics and finance course surveys developments in the area of prudential risk regulation with particular emphasis on stress testing as the primary tool of regulation. This course will explain the motivations for changes to the BIS capital accords from Basel I to Basel III.

Upon completion of this course, participants will receive a certificate bearing the New York Institute of Finance (NYIF) name. A NYIF certificate is a valuable addition to your credentials, proving that you have acquired the work-ready skills that employer’s value.

For those who wish to go further, students can enroll in the other four modules to earn the complete Risk Management Professional Certificate, backed by the New York Institute of Finance’s 93-year history. As a final option, students may also opt to sit for the NYIF Certificate of Mastery Exam, resulting in the Risk Management Certificate of Mastery upon successful completion.

This economics and finance course will cover the practical aspects of conducting CCAR/DFAST tests in the US. We will also review the impact of the financial (subprime) crisis of 2007 and 2008 on regulatory reform and the consequences for financial intermediaries.

Upon completion of this course, participants will receive a certificate bearing the New York Institute of Finance (NYIF) name. A NYIF certificate is a valuable addition to your credentials, proving that you have acquired the work-ready skills that employer’s value.

For those who wish to go further, students can enroll in the other four modules to earn the complete Risk Management Professional Certificate, backed by the New York Institute of Finance’s 93-year history. As a final option, students may also opt to sit for the NYIF Certificate of Mastery Exam, resulting in the Risk Management Certificate of Mastery upon successful completion.

This string theory course focuses on holographic duality (also known as gauge / gravity duality or AdS / CFT) as a novel method of approaching and connecting a range of diverse subjects, including quantum gravity / black holes, QCD at extreme conditions, exotic condensed matter systems, and quantum information.