Online courses directory (363)

Law, in its simplest form, is used to protect one party from another. For instance, laws protect customers from being exploited by companies. Laws protect companies from other companies.  Laws even protect citizens and corporations from the government. However, law is neither perfect nor all encompassing. Sometimes, societal ethics fill the voids that laws leave behind; other times, usually when societal ethics have been systematically violated by a group of the population, we write laws that are designed to require individuals to live up to certain ethical standards. In the backlash of the Enron scandal (where Enron executives used accounting tricks to hide losses) for example, new accounting laws were passed. Similarly, as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, legislators proposed new regulations designed to enforce a certain standard of ethical behavior within the financial services industry. This course will introduce you to the laws and ethical standards that managers must abide by in the course o…

Today, the management of information systems is mostly associated with databases, the Internet, and server rooms.  However, “information management” has been around since before the invention of these tools.  It is as old as commerce itself, as traders, bankers, and merchants have always had reason to track sales and inventory.  Creditors must be aware of how much capital has been lent to borrowers and how much money has been deposited at banks.  Long before humans harnessed electricity, there was a need for information systems.  But currently almost all management of information systems is done electronically. Management Information Systems (MIS) is a formal discipline within business education that bridges the gap between computer science and the well-known business disciplines of finance, marketing, and management.  However, most students will only take one or two MIS courses in their undergraduate programs. You may not know it, but you use MIS every day.  If you use email, you are using MIS…

Management refers to the organization and coordination of work to produce a desired result. A manager is a person who practices management by working with and through people in order to accomplish his or her organization’s goals. When you think of the term manager, you may be imagining your supervisor as he or she hires and terminates employees and makes major decisions above your authority. However, although you may not view yourself in this way, you yourself may also be a manager. In fact, many of us practice management skills in the workplace every day. You may have a team of employees that you manage, or lead a project that requires management strategy, or demonstrate leadership qualities among your peers. These are all scenarios that require you to apply the principles of management. In this course, you will learn to recognize the characteristics of proper management by identifying what successful managers do and how they do it. Understanding how managers work is just as beneficial for the subordinate…

There is no shortage of quotes in which inspirational business leaders describe the sources of their success. Their reasons are often diverse, but almost everyone comes back to the same thing: people. The people are the company; they create the success. In BUS301: Managing Human Capital, you learned how to find, train, and manage these people. Please keep in mind that there is more to successful business leadership than managing human capital. You must have a suitable structure and culture at your firm in order to achieve success. Imagine the U.S. military; it boasts some of the best-trained soldiers in human history, but that talent would be wasted without a structure designed to appropriately deploy forces. In other words, the military would not be as successful without streamlined organizational behavior. Organizational behavior (OB) is the study of how people interact in organizations. These interactions are governed by a number of factors, including your personal life, the personality of your boss or you…

The introduction of Business Communication for Success, the textbook used throughout this course, notes that “[E]ffective communication takes preparation, practice, and persistence.  There are many ways to learn communication skills; the school of experience, or ‘hard knocks,’ is one of them.  But in the business environment, a ‘knock’ (or lesson learned) may come at the expense of your credibility through a blown presentation to a client.” Effective communication skills are a prerequisite for succeeding in business.  Communication tools and activities connect people within and beyond the organization in order to establish the business’s place in the corporate community and the social community, and as a result, that communication needs to be consistent, effective, and customized for the business to prosper.  Business Communication for Success provides theories and practical information that represent the heart of this course, while additional resources are included to expand or pose altern…

Operations management is a science with which we are all, in some capacity, familiar.  We all have scarce resources and have to allocate those resources properly.  Think about the process of preparing a meal: you have to gather all the proper ingredients and prepare them for cooking.  Certain ingredients go in at certain times.  Occasionally, you fall behind or get too far ahead, jeopardizing the entire meal.  And, of course, if you find that you do not have enough ingredients, even more problems arise.  All of these elements of meal preparation - purchasing ingredients, prepping the ingredients by dicing them up, mixing ingredients together, boiling or baking the dish, serving, and cleaning - can be seen as parts of operations management. In the realm of business, operations management is more complicated than preparing a family meal.  There may be hundreds or thousands of participants rather than just you and your brother or wife or grandfather cooking in the kitchen.  Each participant has a speci…

US firms maintain their competitive advantages by holding on to resources their competitors cannot obtain.  What do we mean by “resources?”  The term “resources” can refer to anything from rights to a certain oil field, the patent on touchscreen technology, or an exclusive contract with the government.  More often than not, however, a company’s most valuable resources are its employees.  Often, having the “right” employees  the individuals capable of developing iPhones or finding new oil fields  separates the highly successful firms from their less successful competitors.  As you begin the journey of this course, you might be saying to yourself, "My company may say I am its most valuable resource, but it really do not treat me like I am valued."  This feeling is one of many elements associated with managing human capital. In the United States, the subfield of Human Resource Management (alternatively known as Human Capital Management) has a history that dates back almost a century, bu…

BUS206 [1] introduced you to the subject of Management Information Systems (MIS). The focus of that initial course was on the nuts and bolts of information systems: how they work, how you create them, how to secure them, and so on. This course is developed to help you understand how information technology can be used as part of an organization’s overall strategy. In this course you will focus on the allocation and use of technology resources across an entire firm as part of the larger organizational strategy. Because firms do not have an unlimited supply of capital, they must decide when and where to deploy new information technology. Firms must not only focus on when to deploy IT, but also if they should deploy IT at all! This brings up the bigger question about technology: Can the use of IT bring a sustainable competitive advantage to an organization? There are those who say, “No”; and others who say, “Of course!”  You will explore the differing opinions out there on this topic in unit 1. In un…

This course will introduce you to entrepreneurship and business planning. By way of introduction, the word entrepreneur originates from the French word entreprendre, meaning to undertake. Today, we define an entrepreneur as an owner or manager of a business enterprise who attempts to make profits by starting and growing his or her business. In earnest, entrepreneurs are a diverse group of risk-takers who share the same goal of cultivating ideas and developing them into viable business opportunities. Take a quick look at the statistics below to get a sense for some of the (potentially surprising) qualities that have been attributed to entrepreneurs. According to a recent report by the US Census, every day approximately 2,356 Americans are becoming entrepreneurs by starting new businesses. According to 2006 report from Northeastern University’s School of Technological Entrepreneurship, 62% of entrepreneurs in the US claim innate drive as the number one motivator in starting their business. According t…

Advertising is an integral part of our modern, media-dominated society. While many of us have a love-hate relationship with the industry, advertising can be wonderfully entertaining. However, is advertising a necessary evil? Does it make meaningful contributions to our society? With the incredible growth of social media, now is a particularly exciting time to explore the fascinating world of advertising. The purpose of this course is to lead students in an exploration of fundamental advertising principles and the role advertising plays in the promotional mix. You will learn where advertising fits in the Marketing Mix, also known as the four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Although some consider all promotion synonymous with advertising, you will learn the unique characteristics that separate advertising from other forms of promotional communication. You will revisit some familiar marketing concepts within a new framework, approaching the subject from the advertiser’s perspective. Our text us…

All managers are leaders.  All leaders are managers.  Which of these statements is true?  Neither.  The words are often confused, even in academic settings, because we think that both leaders and managers are in charge of a specific task or group of people.  However, there are many differences between the two.  One such distinction is that a manager may not be in charge of people at all.  For example, a manager may be in charge of data, including its acquisition, analysis, and dissemination.  Or consider the fact that a leader may have no formal power; many of history’s greatest leaders only had power “earned” from their peers instead of power granted by another individual or group.  Think of our country’s founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, who went against the British government to draft the Declaration of Independencethe situation created the “team,” and from that the recognized leaders emerged.  All of these distinctions will be explored in this course. Not only will this cour…

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge defines project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.  The temporary nature of projects indicates a definite beginning and end.  The end is reached when the project’s objectives have been achieved or when the project is terminated because its objectives will not or cannot be met, or when the need for the project no longer exists.” (PMBOK, 2008, p. 5).  The discipline of project management has various definitions.  Some describe it as a systematic method of planning and guiding a project from start to finish, while others have defined project management as a methodical approach of achieving targets and goals while optimizing the use of resources such as people, money, time, and space.  Some have referred to project management as the ability to be open and to elicit commitments through effective communication regarding how team members are willing to participate.  More specifically, the PMBOK (2008) def…

Negotiation refers to the process of interacting in order to advance individual interests through joint action.  Contrary to what you might think, negotiations are not confined to the professional world; we often negotiate in our personal lives.  The principles that guide successful negotiations in world politics are equally important in the business world as well as our personal lives.  In fact, almost every transaction with another individual involves negotiation.  As you will learn in this course, negotiation, conflict resolution, and relationship management are complex processes.  Successful practitioners possess and apply a blend of perceptual, persuasive, analytical, and interpersonal skills that you will examine carefully in this course. In the ever-changing environment of modern business, firms start and grow by virtue of successful negotiations and by developing long-term relationships among two, three, or more parties involved, either directly or indirectly, in various business processes.  B…

The Business Administration major is designed to prepare you for a leadership role in today’s highly competitive, global business environment.  This elective course will allow you to incorporate risk management principles into your individual management style.  Risk management refers to the process of identifying, assessing, and prioritizing risks.  This course will teach you how to accurately assess the consequences of uncertain events; the ultimate goal for risk managers is to reduce and control the likelihood of such occurrences.  Personal attitudes toward risk vary widely (for example, attitudes can range from risk-averse to risk-seeking).  You are advised to approach this course from the perspective of a business manager (i.e., as a decision maker). Unforeseen circumstances can occur in various contexts, including natural disaster, collapses in financial markets, and accidents.  As a business manager, you will need to use risk management tools to minimize and control the probability and impact…

What is strategy?  When your friend tells you that his “strategy” in basketball is to win, he is not telling you a strategy at all.  A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a goalin the case of your friend, a more appropriately defined strategy for his basketball game would be: “I am going to apply defensive pressure and force the opposing team to make mistakes with the end goal of winning the game.”  In this course, you will learn that you must first clearly define your goals before you develop strategies in order to achieve them.  You will also learn that strategy in business is similar to strategy in sports, war, or politics; the parallels are so close that early business strategists studied military strategies in depth.  The science of strategy development has developed beyond this by now, but the parallels still exist. Strategic Management involves two processes: first, the process of identifying specific goals for a firm and designing strategies to achieve those goals, and seco…

Physics 101 is the first course in the Introduction to Physics sequence. In general, the quest of physics is to develop descriptions of the natural world that correspond  closely to actual observations.  Given this definition, the story behind everything in the universe is  one of physics.  In practice,  the field of physics is more often limited to the discovery and refinement of the basic laws that underlie the behavior of matter and energy.  While biology is founded upon physics, in practice, the study of biology generally assumes that the present understanding of physical laws is accurate.  Chemistry is more closely dependent on physics and   assumes that physical laws provide accurate predictions.  Engineering, for the most part, is applied physics. In this course, we will study physics from the ground up, learning the basic principles of physical laws, their application to the behavior of objects, and the use of the scientific method in driving advances in this knowledge.  This first course o…

The physics of the Universe appears to be dominated by the effects of four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and weak and strong nuclear forces.  These control how matter, energy, space, and time interact to produce our physical world.  All other forces, such as the force you exert in standing up, are ultimately derived from these fundamental forces. We have direct daily experience with two of these forces: gravity and electromagnetism.  Consider, for example, the everyday sight of a person sitting on a chair.  The force holding the person on the chair is gravitational, while that gravitational force is balanced by material forces that “push up” to keep the individual in place, and these forces are the direct result of electromagnetic forces on the nanoscale.  On a larger stage, gravity holds the celestial bodies in their orbits, while we see the Universe by the electromagnetic radiation (light, for example) with which it is filled.  The electromagnetic force also makes possible the a…

This course is designed to introduce you to the study of Calculus.  You will learn concrete applications of how calculus is used and, more importantly, why it works.  Calculus is not a new discipline; it has been around since the days of Archimedes.  However, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two 17th-century European mathematicians concurrently working on the same intellectual discovery hundreds of miles apart, were responsible for developing the field as we know it today.  This brings us to our first question, what is today's Calculus?  In its simplest terms, calculus is the study of functions, rates of change, and continuity.  While you may have cultivated a basic understanding of functions in previous math courses, in this course you will come to a more advanced understanding of their complexity, learning to take a closer look at their behaviors and nuances. In this course, we will address three major topics: limits, derivatives, and integrals, as well as study their respective foundations and a…

This course is the second installment of Single-Variable Calculus.  In Part I (MA101) [1], we studied limits, derivatives, and basic integrals as a means to understand the behavior of functions.  In this course (Part II), we will extend our differentiation and integration abilities and apply the techniques we have learned. Additional integration techniques, in particular, are a major part of the course.  In Part I, we learned how to integrate by various formulas and by reversing the chain rule through the technique of substitution.  In Part II, we will learn some clever uses of substitution, how to reverse the product rule for differentiation through a technique called integration by parts, and how to rewrite trigonometric and rational integrands that look impossible into simpler forms.  Series, while a major topic in their own right, also serve to extend our integration reach: they culminate in an application that lets you integrate almost any function you’d like. Integration allows us to calculat…

This chemistry survey is designed to introduce students to the world of chemistry.  The principles of chemistry were first identified, studied, and applied by ancient Egyptians in order to extract metal from ores, make alcoholic beverages, glaze pottery, turn fat into soap, and much more.  What began as a quest to build better weapons or create potions capable of ensuring everlasting life has since become the foundation of modern science.  Take a look around you: chemistry makes up almost everything you touch, see, and feel, from the shampoo you used this morning to the plastic container that holds your lunch.  In this course, we will study chemistry from the ground up, learning the basics of the atom and its behavior.  We will use this knowledge to understand the chemical properties of matter and the changes and reactions that take place in all types of matter.