Online Master of Business Administration (MBAO) 2023-2024 Edition

Courses

MBAO 551. Managerial Economics and Data Analysis. 3 Credit Hours.

In this course, you will explore both micro and macroeconomics and data analysis at a managerial level used in business management today. You will learn to define and interpret concepts such as opportunity cost, elasticity, utility maximizing, and market equilibrium. You will gain a way of understanding the long-term forces that drive the economy and shape the business environment. By the end of this course, you will be able to analyze the core issues in economics, evaluate the effects of internal and external factors on economic issues, employ models to perform economic analysis, apply theory using real world examples, and identify, explain, and compare major economic indicators and apply them to real world applications. Students will also employ regression models to conduct data analysis: applies econometric methods in a business context in order to address managerial questions and help make evidence based decisions.

MBAO 552. Principles of Management. 3 Credit Hours.

This course is designed to help you develop the managerial decision-making skills that are essential for career advancement as well as success in your personal life. To ensure relevance, you will be encouraged to focus on issues that are personally pertinent to your particular career stage. Managers work in a myriad of different contexts around the globe. Through case studies, exercises, and reflective experiences, we will explore how differences in national/regional cultures affect managerial practice as well as how organizational size, age, and status tend to influence organization culture and thereby expectations about what it means to be an “effective” manager.

MBAO 558. Strategic Marketing. 3 Credit Hours.

MBAO 558 provides a conceptual framework for marketing, and explores the challenges involved in using marketing to address the problems of an organization in a dynamic political, economic, social, and technological environment. You will examine a range of marketing problems drawn from both consumer and business markets. By the end of this course, you will be able to explain the marketing management process and consumer behavior, discuss appropriate marketing strategies to succeed in a competitive landscape, describe the importance of marketing research, segmentation, targeting, and positioning, analyze and evaluate the challenges involved in developing new product offerings and the difference between marketing tangible goods and services, and develop, design, and manage pricing strategies, programs, integrated marketing channels, communications, and marketing initiatives in a global context.

MBAO 559. Global Business. 3 Credit Hours.

This course examines the implications of globalization and focuses on the analysis of strategic challenges facing business enterprises in a global environment. The transformation of the world economy has created a need for individuals with a global perspective, multifunctional expertise, and the ability to acquire new knowledge and skills as needed to meet the challenges of continuously changing business conditions. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the role of the “strategic manager” and to develop the necessary knowledge and critical thinking skills to analyze multinational enterprises (MNEs) and formulate global strategy effectively.

MBAO 560. Organizational and Strategic Leadership. 3 Credit Hours.

This course deals with the messiness of real life! The world of modern organizations is highly uncertained. It is filled with contradictions, ambiguities, and imperfections. Events, people or systems do not act in ways that we like. In fact, they may appear irrational to an untrained observer (they may even be irrational based on traditional norms or rationality). It does not matter if you are working for a major corporation, governmental agency or not-for-profit organization. This is the situation facing most leaders in a global economy.

MBAO 561. Entrepreneurial Leadership. 3 Credit Hours.

Entrepreneurial Leadership is not simply a concept to be mastered and applied to tech innovators bent on building the next great world changing business. The skills, temperament, attitudes, techniques, theories and philosophies can and should be practiced across all levels of any organization. Startup and small companies clearly benefit from a dynamic and often visionary leader. It is often through the sheer will of the entrepreneur in these companies that the vision becomes a reality and hopefully a commercial or social success. Larger and more established organizations run the risk of becoming stagnant and complacent. In the extreme they become irrelevant and eventually go out of business. By learning to apply many of the same concepts and skills, often using different implementation techniques, you can develop the expertise to promote an entrepreneurial culture in any organization.

MBAO 563. Leadership Capstone. 3 Credit Hours.

Why are some firms more successful than others? This is the fundamental question that we will tackle in this course. Successful management of an enterprise begins with a coherent, well-defined strategy. This course develops the knowledge and skills necessary to analyze, formulate and implement strategy effectively. We will take the perspective of the senior leader, learning how to assess the external environment, as well as the firm’s internal resources and capabilities, so as to create a successful strategy. We will learn how the leader makes the parts of the firm (functional areas, product lines, and/or geographic units) work in harmony to support the strategy and create a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout the course, we will address the complexity of leading a business in this era of globalization, social and technological change, and dynamic firm and industry boundaries.

MBAO 565. Innovative Healthcare Leadership and Design Thinking. 3 Credit Hours.

In this hands-on course you will learn and apply the design thinking process to the healthcare industry while developing an understanding of the psychological principles that underlie innovative thinking, problem-solving, and human behavior. Leading innovation will require you to lead by example, starting by gaining empathy and asking questions rather than making unilateral decisions. In this course, you will learn about and practice design thinking skills through a variety of methods, exploring healthcare innovations such as those developed in response to COVID-19. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to evaluate the strategic reasons for incorporating human-centered design within your organization’s existing practices, implement the phases of the design thinking process, analyze how human-centered design creates transformational opportunities, and cultivate effective strategies for building commitment toward innovative practices by identifying drivers for change and anticipating resistors.

MBAO 566. Innovative Practice Management. 3 Credit Hours.

In this dynamic course you will learn alongside your classmates and a variety of guest lecturers as we examine the complex nature of running a modern healthcare practice. You will build your knowledge in several key areas that leaders in healthcare need to understand in order to position their organizations for success. Additionally, you will review, finalize, and submit your Healthcare Leadership Project.
Prerequisites: MBAO 550.

MBAO 567. Healthcare Law and Ethics. 3 Credit Hours.

In this course, you will explore the philosophical, medical, social, and legal aspects of bioethical issues in healthcare, and learn how to create and maintain a risk management program designed to provide a safe environment for your healthcare-related organization. Healthcare leaders need to understand the multiple influences on decisions faced by patients, families, health care providers, manufacturers, insurers and organizations. Influencing factors include culture, education, religion, personal and family values, and individual experience. As healthcare has become more highly technical, compartmentalized and impersonal, many ethical considerations are increasingly complex and may be difficult to resolve. In this course, a plethora of case studies are used to explore current issues at the forefront as well as dilemmas raised by class participants in real time.
Prerequisites: MBAO 550.

MBAO 568. Business of Healthcare. 3 Credit Hours.

Managers need to have a solid working knowledge of the financial performance of their business. Regardless of performance, employees wonder about the company’s financial strength. “Should I look for another job?”, “Will the company be here?”, or “everything looks great, let’s keep investing.”. Planning becomes increasingly important. Not only as an exercise about how to deploy scarce resources, but it needs to tell a compelling story of why customers, investors and employees should believe in the business venture.
Prerequisites: MBAO 550.

MBAO 571. Fundamentals of Accounting. 3 Credit Hours.

This course will provide you with a fundamental understanding of professional accounting theory and practice through a review of the accounting cycle and important accounting equations and financial statements. You will explore the importance and application of internal controls, financial performance calculations, cost-volume-profit analysis, and cost estimation. As a result, you will be able to apply fundamental accounting intelligence to business applications.

MBAO 572. Fundamentals of Finance. 3 Credit Hours.

This course introduces an understanding of the functions carried out by the financial manager of an organization with an emphasis on the tools and techniques necessary for sound financial decision making. Topics covered include discounted cash flow analysis, capital budgeting, valuation of stocks and bonds, investment decisions under uncertainty and capital asset pricing. Long-term investment analysis, financing techniques and the management of working capital will also be explored to gain insight into the responsibilities of the financial manager.

MBAO 573. Information Resources Management and Business Analytics. 3 Credit Hours.

This course serves as an introduction to the field of business analytics: the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. You will be exposed to the concepts and tools of analytics, including sampling, testing, confidence, exploration, descriptive statistics, data visualization, predictive analytics, as well as supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques. By the end of this course, you will be able to manage data and apply analytical techniques to make better decisions, solve business analytics problems by applying several quantitative methods, apply descriptive statistics to improve organizational performance, apply, analyze, and evaluate predictive analytics to mitigate risk and increase the probability of organizational success, and create data visualizations to depict quantitative and qualitative insights.