Online courses directory (412)

Have you ever wondered what qualities billionaire Warren Buffet, visionary Steve Jobs, or upcoming Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com all have in common?  After you finish studying business practices in this course, you may discover that you have some of the same qualities as other successful entrepreneurs. This course is designed as a survey course that will expose you to business terminology, concepts, and current business issues.  The intent is to develop a viable business vocabulary, foster critical and analytical thinking, and refine your business decision-making skills.  These skills will be acquired by the reading materials, exercises, and research assignments in this course that simulate the workplace today.  By delving into the five units of this course, you will be able to fine tune your direction and choice of career in business. A major goal of your education is to help you become a citizen who can contribute and compete in an increasingly global environment.  Elements of this course will focus on…

This series of videos explores the integration of ethics into the business school curriculum and the importance of ethic

A simple guide to getting all necessary to becoming successful in Forex trading

Accounting can be considered the language of business. If you are learning accounting for the first time, embracing its foundational concepts may be a challenging process. Mastery of accounting primarily rests in your ability to critically think through and synthesize the information as it applies to a given situation. You should approach the learning of accounting the same way you would approach learning a foreign language; It will take time and practice to ensure you remember the concepts. There are a number of sub-disciplines that fall under the umbrella of “accounting,” but in this course, we will be focused on financial accounting. Accounting as a business discipline can be viewed as a system of compiled data. The word data should not be confused with “information.” In terms of accounting, “data” should be viewed as the raw transactions or business activity that happens within any business entity. For example: Someone uses $30,000 of their savings to start a business. The use of these f…

In BUS103 [1] (Financial Accounting), we learned that firms need to track various forms of data in order to report to investors, regulators, and potential business associates such as customers and vendors.  Firm managers, however, often need information that is much more detailed than the data provided in these financial reports.  They use what is known as “managerial accounting” to make various decisions about their businesses.  To avoid information overload, much of their data is tailored to the needs of a particular business unit instead of generally applicable to the firm as a whole. As you might expect, different managers have different needs.  However, almost all management decisions deal with the same key issues: cost, price, and profit.  This course will examine this sort of decision-making, identifying the tools and methods managers use to make the best-informed decisions possible.  We will begin with an introduction to the terms that will be referenced in the later units.  We will then…

The purpose of this course is to provide you with a basic understanding of the principles of microeconomics.  At its core, the study of economics deals with the choices and decisions that have to be made in order to manage scarce resources available to us. Microeconomics is the branch of economics that pertains to decisions made at the individual level, i.e. by individual consumers or individual firms, after evaluating resources, costs, and tradeoffs.  When we talk about “the economy,” then, we are referring to the marketplace or system in which these choices interact with one another.  In this course, we will learn how and why these decisions are made and how they affect one another in the economy. Each of the following units has been designed as a building block, where the concepts you learn in one unit will enable you to understand the material you discover in the next.  By the end of this course, you will have a strong grasp on the major issues that face microeconomists, including consumer and p…

Economics is traditionally divided into two parts: microeconomics and macroeconomics.  The purpose of this course is to provide you with a fundamental understanding of the principles of macroeconomics.  Macroeconomists study how a country’s economy works and try to determine the best choices to improve the overall wellbeing of a nation.  Typical topics include inflation (the overall level of prices), employment, fiscal policy (government taxing and spending), and money and banking (interest rates and lending policies).  Individuals and firms need to consider how macroeconomic events will affect their own prosperity.  To better define macroeconomics, consider its distinction from microeconomics.  Imagine you are attempting to figure out how the price of a certain good (say, bread) has been determined.  Microeconomics would focus on how the supply of and the demand for bread determine its prices.  It would examine factors like the input prices and the consumer's demand in order to determine the curren…

This free HR ALISON course introduces you to the world of Human Resources management (HRM) and is a useful introduction to those who wish to learn and understand more about the role it plays within organizations.<br /><br />The lessons examine the various functions of HRM in organizations including responsibilities and objectives, the employment cycle, job analysis, recruitment and selection, and performance appraisal as well as employee relations, and managing change within the workplace.<br />

In BUS103: Financial Accounting [1], we learned that firms are required to keep detailed financial records so that organized reports can be distributed to managers, shareholders, and government regulators.  Principles of Finance will focus on what these managers, investors, and government agencies do with this information.  It is an introductory course to various fields of finance and is comparable in content to courses that other institutions label as “corporate finance” or “financial management.” Finance is a broad term; you will find that both managers that compile the financial reports we discussed in financial accounting and stockbrokers working on Wall Street will claim that they work in finance.  So what exactly is finance?  Finance is the science of fund management.  It is distinct from accounting in that, whereas accounting aims at organizing and compiling past information, finance is geared towards deciding what to do with that information. In this course, you will be exposed to a n…

In this course, you will learn about the marketing process and examine the range of marketing decisions that an organization must make in order to sell its products and services. You will also learn how to think like a marketer, discovering that the focus of marketing has always been on the consumer. You will begin to ask, “Who is the consumer of goods and services?” What does the consumer need? What does the consumer want? Marketing is an understanding of how to communicate with the consumer, and is characterized by four activities: Creating products and services that serve consumers Communicating a clear value proposition Delivering products and services in a way that optimizes value Exchanging, or trading, value for those offerings Many people incorrectly believe that marketing and advertising are one in the same. In reality, advertising is just one of many tools used in marketing, which is the process by which firms determine which products to offer, how to price those products, and to whom th…

This course will introduce you to business statistics, or the application of statistics in the workplace. Statistics is a course in the methods for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. If you have taken a statistics course in the past, you may find some of the topics in this course familiar. You can apply statistics to any number of fields from anthropology to hedge fund management because many of us best interpret data when it is presented in an organized fashion (as it is with statistics). You can analyze data in any number of forms. Summary statistics, for example, provide an overview of a data set, such as the average score on an exam. However, the average does not always tell the entire story; for example, if the average score is 80, it may be because half of the students received 100s and the other half received 60s. This would present a much different story than if everyone in the class had received an 80, which demonstrates consistency. Statistics provides more than simple averages. In t…

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…

This is an introductory course in macroeconomics offered at the American University in Bulgaria in Spring 2008. It provi

Gain fundamental insights to world of Operations Management from award winning Professor Gad Allon