Online courses directory (412)

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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…

In economics, the term "labor" refers to workers.  As a factor of production, labor earns wages for the services that it renders.  As such, students of labor economics have traditionally set out to understand wage formation, the level of employment, and all elements that go into the making of a wage relationship.  Over the years, the social and economic contexts in which labor markets operate have become increasingly complex; nowadays, labor economics is no longer limited to the study of wages.  Modern labor economics instead seeks to understand the complex workings of the labor market by studying the dynamics between employers, employees, and their wage-, price-, and profit-making incentives.  In other words, modern labor economics explores the outcomes of the labor market under the assumption that workers strive to maximize their wellbeing and firms strive to maximize profits.  It also analyzes the behavior of employers and employees and studies their responses to changes in government policies and/or…

Welcome to the exciting world of Payroll Administration!  What you’ll learn in this course is essential to your understanding of the human-resources concept of payroll as it is interpreted from a business perspective.  In applying the theoretical principles of the course in real-world ways, you should gain a better understanding of yourself and your work environment.  The goal of this course is to help you develop the fundamental skills critical to payroll operations, and to help you understand state and federal compliance.  This will provide you with a foundation for becoming more versed on the depth of payroll as an intricate component of human-resource management, and business overall. Fundamentally, the concept of payroll is rooted in both human-resource management and accounting principles.  From a human-resource management perspective, the concept of payroll embodies compliance, which includes the identification of the relationship between the employee and the employer.  There are a number of…

This course provides an introduction to exploring and understanding arguments by explaining what the parts of an argument are, and how to break arguments into their parts and create diagrams to show how those parts relate to each other. Argument diagramming is a great visual tool for evaluating claims that people make. By the end of the course, you will be able to think critically about arguments or claims and determine whether or not they are logical. This skill can be used in a variety of situations, such as listening to the news, reading an article, or making a point in a meeting. This is an introductory course and may be useful to a broad range of students.

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…

In this course, you will look at the properties behind the basic concepts of probability and statistics and focus on applications of statistical knowledge.  You will learn about how statistics and probability work together.  The subject of statistics involves the study of methods for collecting, summarizing, and interpreting data.  Statistics formalizes the process of making decisions, and this course is designed to help you use statistical literacy to make better decisions.  Note that this course has applications for the natural sciences, economics, computer science, finance, psychology, sociology, criminology, and many other fields. We read data in articles and reports every day.  After finishing this course, you should be comfortable evaluating an author's use of data.  You will be able to extract information from articles and display that information effectively.  You will also be able to understand the basics of how to draw statistical conclusions. This course will begin with descriptive statistic…

Math for Economists will help you assemble a toolkit of skills and techniques to solve fundamental problems in both macroeconomics and microeconomics.  The material covers both precalculus and calculus concepts and should help you identify the best approach to solving problems.  For example, an economist may be called upon to determine the right mix allocation of capital to a production process.  The tools in this course will help you evaluate the options and select from the best alternatives.  Advanced courses in economics typically utilize mathematical techniques beyond basic calculus; so, gaining practice in fundamental skills can serve as a good basis for further study.  Of note, this course applies precalculus and calculus; this is different from “applied math,” which economists typically use to refer to probability and statistics. This course begins with a survey of basic optimization tools and then applies them to solve problems over several periods in time.  These optimization tools descri…

HMP 607 is the third in a three-course sequence intended to impart to generalist administrators the knowledge of finance and accounting necessary to manage health care organizations. The first course, HMP 608, covers financial accounting. The second course, HMP 606, focuses on managerial accounting topics. This third course concentrates on corporate finance topics. It aims to impart an understanding of how finance theory and practice can inform the decision-making of the health care firm. As such, HMP 607 is most appropriately considered a corporate finance course, as opposed to a course in financial markets. In addition, it will integrate corporate finance and accounting theories, institutional knowledge of health care finance, and applications to specific problems. Course Level: Graduate This Work, HMP 607 - Corporate Finance for Health Care Administrators, by Jack Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

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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…

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…

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…

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…

The purpose of Introduction to Human Resources Management is to provide a general overview of the concepts and applications of the many parts of Human Resources (HR).  This course is for the entry level HR Generalist who wants to explore how the interdependence of the major topics in HR are created and implemented.  Upon completion of this course, you will be able to apply your knowledge to real world HR issues.  While general topics such as benefits and compensation will be covered in other Human Resource Management courses, this course will focus primarily on the employee life cycle and each of its phases.  The employee life cycle is central to most of the functions and purposes of HR.  It is important to start at the beginning of any life cycle in an effort to understand how each component is dependent on the next. To begin with, you will take a look at the history of HR and determine the major events and champion theorists who brought HR to its humble beginnings.  The course will then cover the em…

Provides an understanding of why societies, cultures, organizations, and individuals create and keep records. Presents cornerstone terminology, concepts, and practices used in records management and archival administration. Examines the evolution of methods and technologies used to create, store, organize, and preserve records and the ways in which organizations and individuals use archives and records for ongoing operations, accountability, research, litigation, and organizational memory. Participants become familiar with the legal, policy, and ethical issues surrounding records and archives administration and become conversant with the structure, organization, and literatures of the archival and records management professions. Course Level: Graduate This Work, SI 580 - Understanding Records and Archives: Principles and Practices, by Paul Conway is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Great managers are made, not born. Learn about the qualities and skills of great managers in this Business 101 course. Instructor Sherri Hartzell holds both an MBA and Ed.D., so she's an excellent choice to teach you about principles of management.

Start by learning about the different levels of management in organizations and then dive into how good managers lead to great employees. Students of business, budding entrepreneurs and independent online learners alike can benefit from these short, engaging video lessons and interactive online quizzes. Business 101: Principles of Management can prepare you to earn real, widely transferable college credit by taking the Principles of Management CLEP exam or the Excelsior Principles of Management exam .

This course introduces major theories of economic development and to place them in a historical context. In his contributory introduction “Economic Growth, Economic Development and Human Development” in The Development Economics Reader (2008), edited by Giorgio Secondi and published by Routledge, Secondi defines economic development as the “branch of economics that studies relatively poor countries.” In the same book, Mahbub ul Haq, writing under the title “The Human Development Paradigm,” suggests that the “basic purpose of development is to enlarge people’s choices,” which is in line with the views expressed by the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. Whether development is simply studying poor countries or expanding people’s choices in poor countries, one of the essential requirements is that there must be a means for making the choices available. This means that economic development must include growth, but growth can take place without economic development. Without economic growth, the choices…

Build a personal life plan in a small group environment. Life Prep on Canvas Network is a course for self-discovery and goal setting. Progress through a series of short journaling exercises, engage in small group discussions, and get and provide feedback with peers as you build a personal life plan, revise your goals, and move toward your personal success. Plan on 2-3 hours of work per week and on being an active, supportive group member. Root your goals in your nature, beliefs, and values to move with clarity, purpose, and confidence.

This course will provide you with a comprehensive introduction to spreadsheets. The course is designed for first-time users with very little or no exposure to the subject. For this course, you will use Microsoft Excel as the software. The course will explore the following fundamental topics: an introduction to spreadsheets, terminology in Excel, components of a spreadsheet, what a cell consists of, and the creation of a spreadsheet for practical use.  You will examine sample files, videos, and books that will enable you to gain practical knowledge about spreadsheets that can be used in daily life, either at work, school, or home.