Online courses directory (412)

Learn how to have more successful relationships with difficult bosses, co-workers, students, neighbors, or relatives.

Learn proven, step-by-step strategies to achieve higher positions with major search engines.

This course will help you understand business environments, financial statements, and strategy so you can make more profitable business and personal financial decisions.

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…

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…

This course is designed to extend your knowledge of the basic microeconomic principles that will provide the foundation for your future work in economics and give you insight into how economic models can help us think about important real world phenomena.  Topics include supply and demand interaction, utility maximization, profit maximization, elasticity, perfect competition, monopoly power, imperfect competition, and game theory. Microeconomics is the study of rational choice behavior on the part of individual consumers and firms.  In general, economists are interested in how market mechanisms solve extremely complex resource allocation problems.  This course presents a logical and coherent framework in which to organize observed economic phenomena. Several economic "models" are developed and analyzed in order to help explain and predict a wide variety of economic (and sometimes, seemingly non-economic) phenomena.  Microeconomic theory is based on the notion that individuals (and firms) have well defin…

This is where you learn to start and operate a business. Whether you have a business or simply just want to learn or start a business this is the place. Your teacher Jamie Knight Has been in business for over twenty years and is currently owner/President/CEO of JKnight Enterprises Inc. Visit our websites at: www.jknightenterprises.webs.com. This course starts you from the very beginning to the end in business. You will learn about taxes, payroll, employee management and much more.

Learn how to research and develop relationships with potential funding sources, organize grantwriting campaigns, and prepare proposals.

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…

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…

Public Finance rests at the intersection of two disciplines: Public Economics and Public Choice.  Public Economics deals with issues of social optimality: how much of a good (or ill) does a society desire (or tolerate), and how do we incentivize producers and consumers to attain that amount?  Public economics concerns itself with externalities, which are costs that are borne by persons not involved in a market transaction.  There are both positive and negative externalities; public economists want to know how we get more of the good and less of the bad.  Public choice is the field of economics that looks into the behavior of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats and studies how they choose given different policy institutions. The field of Public Finance studies the interaction between these two disciplines, asking questions like: How do the incentives of the political actors shape the policies they craft?  How does that in turn affect the outcomes in the marketplace?  Alternately, students of Public Fi…

Protect your assets and discover how best to achieve all your financial goals.

Gain a marketable new skill by learning the basics of double-entry bookkeeping, financial reporting, and more.

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 explores the concept of online reputation and its potential impact on participants

This is the capstone course in the Saylor Customer Service certificate program which is currently under development. CUST105 is designed to teach you about the customer service work environment, methods for successful customer relations, and career advancement tactics. Future courses in the certificate program will provide a solid knowledge base in the areas of computer skills, business communications, and best customer service practices.

This course provides students with an introduction to the core technologies used to communicate information on the Web: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  Whether managing an employer's website, producing an online resume, or starting a web-based business, knowing the fundamentals of how information is structured and presented on the internet is a crucial skill for the contemporary workplace. Today, many technologies exist to facilitate the creation and management of websites, including development environments like Adobe Dreamweaver and Content Management Systems like WordPress and Joomla!  Even though mastery of the basics of HTML and CSS is easily attainable, these labor-saving technologies have discouraged many professionals from learning crucial coding skills.  With a basic understanding of how HTML code is created and transformed, professionals are better able to produce or transform websites according to precise specifications, whether they use a fully-featured dev…

This course teaches the core principles of economics using a collection of experiments and workbooks. In the experiments, students become traders in a market and attempt to make profitable deals with one another. At the conclusion of the experiment, the data are used to form a customized, online workbook. Each workbook guides the student through the analysis of the experiment’s outcome, while simultaneously presenting the key ideas and core principles in economics needed to gain a deeper understanding of both the experiment and economic life. In these experiments the student is both a participant and an observer. As a participant, the student experiences first hand the issues that all economic agents must confront; as an observer, the student sees how modern economic theory can explain the complex interactions that occur in both the experiments, and the economic world at large. Students often report that they learn nearly as much about economic principles from their experience as a participant as they do from their analysis of the experiment as an observer. Students learning on their own or in small classes (generally fewer than 10 students) can still use the workbooks, but will be given synthetic data. Small numbers of students participating in experiments does not yield enough data for the workbooks.

Turn your business ideas into a solid plan for financing and long-term success.

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…