Core Online MBA Coursework (33 Credits)
Financial Management examines the conceptual and practical issues involved in contemporary financial management. Primary emphasis is placed on the development of analytical tools needed by financial managers seeking to maximize shareholder value. Topics covered include financial statement analysis, working capital management, risk measurement, valuation, capital structure, cost of capital, capital budgeting, dividend policy, and financing alternatives.
Additional topics frequently covered in this course include the use of derivative securities; international financial management; mergers, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring; and the instruments and operation of the money and capital markets.
Total Credits: 3
Information is a critical organizational resource. This course provides frameworks for evaluating a firm’s portfolio of information technology investments and alternatives, for identifying future opportunities for business transformation, and for managing information technology resources within the organization. Topics include the use of information systems (IS) for competitive advantage, the role and organization of the IS function in the firm, options for sourcing IS, the management of IS projects, and recent technological advances.
Total Credits: 3
Organizational behavior focuses on the understanding of employee behaviors and attitudes that ultimately contribute to organizational success or failure. The study of organizational behavior attempts to identify critical organizational factors that influence workers, the processes by which these factors exert their influence, and ways of applying this knowledge within organizations. The course is based on principles of scientific inquiry and knowledge from the behavioral sciences.
All managers have traditionally been held accountable for influencing their employees’ levels of job satisfaction, absenteeism, turnover, and performance. The focus here is on understanding current managerial approaches, models, and methods for influencing these critical outcomes. The course covers individual, group, and organizational influences on organizational effectiveness.
Total Credits: 3
The ability to use and manage information, both financial and nonfinancial, is becoming the key to success in today’s business environment. As accounting is the language of business, it is imperative that managers understand accounting systems and accounting information. This course focuses on how financial information is prepared for external users (financial accounting), how to interpret the information provided in externally oriented financial reports, and how managers can use this information in their decision-making processes. The accounting cycle, financial reports, and the impact of accounting alternatives on reported financial information are the main focus of this course.
Total Credits: 3
This course is an introduction to data analysis, probability, and statistical methods for improving managerial decision-making. Analytics topics covered include data management, descriptive analytics, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, regression analysis, modeling uncertainty, and decision analysis. The course emphasizes applications of analytics to the functional areas of business and how to conduct analyses, interpret results, and effectively communicate the results.
Total Credits: 3
This course is a continuation of MGT 7025 to more advanced modeling. Topics include descriptive and predictive data mining, Monte Carlo, and discrete event simulation and optimization. The course emphasizes applications of these to the functional areas of business and how to conduct analyses, interpret results, and effectively communicate the results.
Total Credits: 1.5
The second half of the core accounting course sequence focuses on the generation, maintenance, and interpretation of the internally generated financial information (management accounting) that is necessary for effective managerial decision-making. Course topics include cost behavior, relevant costing, cost information systems, capital budgeting, and resource allocation.
Total Credits: 1.5
The course examines the fundamental components of the strategic management discipline. Strategy process, content, and context will be explored utilizing texts, historical and contemporary case studies, and the seminal academic and current practitioner literatures. The topics comprise the integrative core of strategic management and establish an interdisciplinary framework that connects to other courses in the curriculum. Subjects and concepts include strategy formulation, industry and competitive analysis, and competitive advantage.
Total Credits: 1.5
A survey of legal subjects that managers frequently encounter in their careers and with which every manager should be conversant, including: property, contract, tort, corporate governance, employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and government regulation. In addition, the student will learn the sources of American law, how the legal system works, particularly in a litigation context, and will garner an appreciation for the limits and logic of the law.
Total Credits: 1.5
This course uses the tools and concepts of microeconomics to analyze decision problems within a business firm. Topics include the goal of the firm, capital budgeting, consumer demand, the empirical estimation of demand, production and costs, pricing, and profit maximization under various industry structures. These fundamentals provide a better understanding of the microeconomic environments faced by managers in making strategic business decisions.
Total Credits: 3
As the economic world becomes increasingly interdependent, strategic management can no longer be considered primarily in a domestic setting. As firms increase their global involvement, managing across countries and cultures places an increasing burden on managerial capabilities.
The Global Strategic Management course has been designed to acquaint students with managing strategies and organizations in a global context. The course exposes students to concepts and frameworks for strategy formulation, industry and competitor analysis, impact of public policy on strategic management, organizational configurations and contexts, cross-cultural/comparative management, transitional management, and strategic control.
Total Credits: 3
Marketing Management is structured around the central business goal of maximizing enterprise value. As a discipline, marketing contributes to enterprise value by delivering customer value profitably. All topics addressed in the course demonstrate how firms deliver customer value in both consumer and business-to-business marketplaces.
Emphasis is placed on the managerial activities of strategic planning, market and competitive analyses, customer behavior evaluation, value assessment, market segmentation, targeting, positioning, and marketing mix design. Instruction features case discussions, lectures, team exercises, a student project and presentation, and a computer simulation game.
Total Credits: 3
The competitive environment is fiercer than ever, resources are tighter, customers are more discriminating, and the pressure to do more with less is intensifying. Additionally, recent marketplace trends such as rapidly evolving product and process technology, unbridled globalization of markets, shortening product life cycles, increasingly pervasive impact of information technology, and the urgency to deliver ever-increasing customer value are often creating a seemingly insurmountable challenge for businesses to survive.
Now, more than ever, firms must continually reassess their competitive operations strategies to maintain their competitiveness in the global marketplace. This course is about using operations to compete and win a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. The course will focus on the management of various transformation processes that organizations use to change inputs, such as labor, capital, and raw materials, into both products and services. Issues to be discussed range from the strategic to the tactical.
Total Credits: 3