On Demand Online Learning   

By now you have definitely heard about data science and big data. In this one-week class, we will provide a crash course in what these terms mean and how they play a role in successful organizations. This class is for anyone who wants to learn what all the data science action is about, including those who will eventually need to manage data scientists. The goal is to get you up to speed as quickly as possible on data science without all the fluff. We've designed this course to be as convenient as possible without sacrificing any of the essentials.

This is a focused course designed to rapidly get you up to speed on the field of data science. Our goal was to make this as convenient as possible for you without sacrificing any essential content. We've left the technical information aside so that you can focus on managing your team and moving it forward.

After completing this course you will know.

1. How to describe the role data science plays in various contexts
2. How statistics, machine learning, and software engineering play a role in data science
3. How to describe the structure of a data science project
4. Know the key terms and tools used by data scientists
5. How to identify a successful and an unsuccessful data science project
3. The role of a data science manager


Course cover image by r2hox. Creative Commons BY-SA: https://flic.kr/p/gdMuhT

Financial Accounting is often called the language of business; it is the language that managers use to communicate the firm's financial and economic information to external parties such as shareholders and creditors. Nobody working in business can afford financial illiteracy. Whether you run your own business, work as a manager or are just starting your career, you want to understand financial information and be able to interact with accountants, controllers, and financial managers. You want to talk business!

This course will provide you with the accounting language's essentials. Upon completion, you should be able to read and interpret financial statements for business diagnosis and decision-making. More importantly, you will possess the conceptual base to keep learning more sophisticated accounting and finance on your own. Do not forget that, as with any other language, becoming proficient with accounting requires constant practice.

Why are organisational misbehaviours such as cynicism, apathy, bullying and disengagement increasingly prevalent in the workplace? This course examines these tensions and how transformational, authentic and inclusive leadership styles offer an alternative to the more autocratic, job-centred and controlling leadership styles of the past. You’ll learn how the digital revolution, along with an increased focus on projects and teamwork, has dramatically altered the perception of leadership in a way that now demands all organisational members take on some form of self-leadership. And you’ll learn how this change is causing tensions between traditional leaders and the contemporary practices vital to maintain agility in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace. This learning will be complemented by structured activities such as video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments.

It used to be the case that everyone viewed webpages on about the same size screen. But with the explosion of the use of smartphones to access the Internet, the landscape of design has completely changed. People viewing your site will now expect that it will perform regardless of the platform (smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer). This ability to respond to any platform is called responsive design.

This course will expand upon the basic knowledge of CSS3 to include topics such as wireframes, fluid design, media queries, and the use of existing styling paradigms such as Bootstrap. After the course, learners will be able to:

• Explain the mobile-first paradigm and the importance of wireframes in the design phase
• Create sites that behave across a range of platforms
• Utilize existing design frameworks such as Bootstrap

This is the fourth course in the Web Design For Everybody specialization. A basic understanding of HTML and CSS is expected when you enroll in this class. Additional courses focus on adding interactivity with the JavaScript Programming Language and completing a capstone project.

This course examines the relation of advertising to society, culture, history, and the economy. Using contemporary theories about visual communications, we learn to analyze the complex levels of meaning in both print advertisements and television commercials.

About the Course

The course covers a wide range of topics, including the origins of advertising, the creation of ads, the interpretation of ads, the depiction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in advertising, sex and selling, adverting and ethics, and the future of advertising. The lectures will discuss theoretical frameworks and apply them to specific advertisements.

Course Syllabus

Week 1: What is advertising and where did it come from?

Week 2: Am I being manipulated by advertising?

Week 3: What’s in an ad beyond that which meets the eye?

Week 4: How do ads get made?

Week 5: What do ads teach us about race, class, gender, and sexuality?

Week 6: Does sex sell?

Week 7: What is the future of advertising?

Recommended Background

No background is required; everyone is welcome!

Suggested Readings

Although the lectures are designed to be self-contained, we recommend that students refer to the free online textbook ADTextOnline.org. Other free resources will be suggested for each week’s module.

Course Format

Most videos will be lectures with instructor talking. Each lecture will be illustrated with PowerPoint slides, print advertisements, and TV commercials. The videos for each week will consist of segments that add up to about an hour. Each week will have one quiz that will appear as stand-alone homework. All resources beyond lectures will be available online to students at no charge. Most of these will be from ADTextOnline.org. Others will be visits to the sites of ad agencies in the US and abroad, open access websites that deal with course topics, and open-access journal articles.

This course will establish you as an expert in Meta Ads Manager. Learn how to structure campaigns in Ads Manager by selecting ad objectives, target audience, budget, and placement that fit your unique goals. Learn to create and manage ads across Facebook and Instagram and evaluate and optimize the results of your Ads Manager campaigns. You will end the course by creating an actual ad campaign in Ads Manager to expand not only your knowledge, but your social media marketing portfolio.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
• Structure campaigns in Meta Ads Manager
• Identify the major components and elements of an ad in Meta Ads Manager
• Build an ad that aligns with your marketing objectives and target it to your intended audience
• Set a budget, placement, and schedule for your ads in Meta Ads Manager
• Edit and troubleshoot your ads in Meta Ads Manager

This course is intended for people who want to learn how to use Meta Ads Manager to create, manage and optimize campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Learners don't need marketing experience, but they have basic internet navigation skills and are eager to participate and connect in social media.

Learners must have a Facebook account and an Instagram account helps. Ideally, learners have already completed the four previous courses in this program.

Few capabilities focus agile like a strong analytics program. Such a program determines where a team should focus from one agile iteration (sprint) to the next. Successful analytics are rarely hard to understand and are often startling in their clarity. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, you'll learn how to build a strong analytics infrastructure for your team, integrating it with the core of your drive to value.

In this course, you will learn the neuroscience of change, why we are so change-averse, how to train for change resilience, and most importantly, you will begin developing a practice to help you be prepared for changes in personal life and in your career.

You will learn specific strategies and tools for overcoming fear, anxiety and managing stress related to these changes. By the end of this course, you will know what you need to do to become truly unshakable. You will build a practice for getting stronger emotionally and mentally.

By understanding neuroscience and building awareness of yourself, you will build a solid foundation for understanding your team and the greater behavior of the business world.

Remember, these changes won’t happen if you don’t take action. You might be uncomfortable, you might find some of the exercises silly, you might have doubts, and you might want to quit. Babies don’t quit trying to walk because they fall a lot, and neither should you. The only way to truly change is to practice consistently.

This is a foundational course in the Agile Leadership Specialization. By the end of this course, you will build an understanding of key agile leadership concepts. You will begin building a toolbox that will give you an ability to evaluate and create a baseline for yourself as an agile leader. You will access your team’s readiness for change. You will also analyze to what degree an organization is agile, and evaluate its ability to respond to change triggers.

Despite everyone's good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many teams end up creating products that no one wants, no one can use, and no one buys. But it doesn't have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different--and effective--approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this course, you’ll learn how to determine what's valuable to a user early in the process--to frontload value--by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective.

This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

This course covers the techniques required to break down and map requirements into plans that will ultimately drive software production.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Create effective plans for software development
• Map user requirements to developer tasks
• Assess and plan for project risks
• Apply velocity-driven planning techniques
• Generate work estimates for software products

This course will provide you with a basic, intuitive and practical introduction into Probability Theory. You will be able to learn how to apply Probability Theory in different scenarios and you will earn a "toolbox" of methods to deal with uncertainty in your daily life.

The course is split in 5 modules. In each module you will first have an easy introduction into the topic, which will serve as a basis to further develop your knowledge about the topic and acquire the "tools" to deal with uncertainty. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to complete 5 exercise sessions to reflect about the content learned in each module and start applying your earned knowledge right away.

The topics covered are: "Probability", "Conditional Probability", "Applications", "Random Variables", and "Normal Distribution".

You will see how the modules are taught in a lively way, focusing on having an entertaining and useful learning experience! We are looking forward to see you online!

When does an opportunity to increase the bottom line become a liability for long-term brand sustainability and profitability? That is the question that GAS GAS, an off-road motorcycle manufacturer, is confronting.

In this culminating course, it’s time to use the business tools you have learned throughout the specialization to solve this real business problem. To help you as you develop a solution to the GAS GAS dilemma, in the Capstone you will also learn a six-step analysis of business problems methodology. By the end of the course, you will understand how to weave together considerations from accounting, finance, marketing and organizational behavior in order to arrive at a sound decision that will positively impact the firm’s future.

AI is everywhere! By harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence, businesses and marketers have amazing growth potential, and the opportunities to enhance marketing with AI are always expanding. But how can businesses use AI tools to drive their success and gain sustainable competitive advantages? What are the challenges faced by businesses as they implement AI into their marketing strategies?

In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and delivered by Professor of Business Administration Raj Venkatesan, you will explore an important frontier of digital transformation in marketing. You will examine three key forces that enable AI in marketing strategies - Algorithms, Networks, and Data - and gain a deeper understanding of how businesses in a wide variety of industries can get the most out of this exciting technology. You will see real world examples of successful companies like Ford, Netflix, and the Washington Post using AI to take on the competition in new and creative ways, and hear from experts about how AI is shaping the present and the future in their respective industries.

You can learn more about Raj by following his posts on Twitter (@rajkumarvenk) and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/education-marketing.

This course provides an intensive conceptual and applied introduction to auditing in society. It focuses on concepts and applications related to financial-statement auditors’ professional responsibilities as well as major facets of the audit process including risk assessment and audit reporting. In the U.S. financial-statement audits and related services generally are provided by Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). To succeed in this course, you should anticipate engaging in critical thinking and thoughtful communication about audit professionals' decision environments, decision processes, and deliverables. Additionally, you should understand the macro-level learning objectives in each of the course's weekly modules.

This course provides a continuation of the intensive conceptual and applied introduction to auditing in society begun in Auditing I: Conceptual Foundations of Auditing. It focuses on a conceptual framework that is applied by audit professionals to assess, evaluate, and manage audit risks and evidence.

This four week course focuses on migrating workloads to AWS. We will focus on  analyzing your current environment, planning your migration, AWS services that are commonly used during your migration, and the actual migration steps. 

Hands-on labs are available, though not required for this class. Access to the labs is limited to paid enrolled students. You can audit this course without taking the labs. As we dive into each of the services covered in this class, there will be links to documentation where you can find example applications and code samples.

This course is also available in Spanish. To join the fully translated Spanish version, visit this page:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/aws-fundamentals-cloud-migration-es.

To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. We’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin, such as:

How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold?

After this course, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin in your own projects.

Course Lecturers:
Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University


All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.

The current global financial system is riddled with inefficiencies, uneven developments, and bizarre contradictions. Blockchain technology has the potential to bring about profound changes to financial services. In this course, you will learn how blockchain technology will disrupt the core functions of the financial services industry, offering individuals and organizations alike real choices in how they create and manage value.

A good project schedule helps all team members’ work together to meet project objectives. A project budget with realistic cost constraints is also an essential bedrock of any project. In this course you’ll learn to plan and stick to time and cost constraints in order to ensure the success of your projects.

Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
1. Identify the resource needs of the project
2. Decompose work packages into activities
3. Define what is needed to estimate activity durations
4. Define milestones and create a milestone schedule
5. Determine the critical path and calculate float
6. Describe the purpose of using leads and lags in a project schedule
7. Estimate the quantities and costs of resources required to perform project activities
8. Select one of three common cost estimating techniques to determine a project budget
9. Use a responsibility assignment matrix to assign responsibilities
10. Recognize the components of a project’s quality management plan

In this course you will interpret the components of a relational data model, convert that model into a relational database, and then test the database design. The process of database design begins with requirements analysis to determine who will use the new database and how it will be used. The results of the detailed analysis are recorded in an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), which documents entities and their attributes, along with the relationships between entities. The ERD (logical design) is then converted into the Relational Model, which serves as the blueprint for the actual creation of a database in a database management system. By the end of this course, you will have used a blueprint—a Relational Model—to create a database using SQLiteStudio. In addition, you will have developed test data and queries to validate the database design represented by the Relational Model.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

By the end of this project, you will be able to build a lean workflow applying the Kanban method to support efficient business process management.

To do this you will gain hands-on experience working in the Miro online visual collaboration platform for teamwork where you will leverage agile principles and the Kanban framework to produce a lean workflow.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

Globalisation and advances in information and communication technology have resulted in a 24/7 work environment characterised by rapid change, a greater sense of competition, and an explosion in access to communication and information. These pressures compound stress related to workload and information processing – this not only reduces performance but can lead to a reduced sense of meaning and purpose as well as physical and mental health issues. Understanding stress and how to boost your resilience to it are essential skills for contemporary leaders and play a vital role in managing the demands you face at work. This course will focus on the nature of stressors facing leaders in today’s work environments and how to deal with them. You’ll explore personal resilience – your capacity to withstand and cope with stress – and strategies for self-management, motivation and organisation. You’ll also learn how resilience is impacted by health and social relationships.

In Course 4, we are quite literally “putting it all together”. We will review the insights we gained from our barter experiment and use the tools we created each week to curate your Sales Toolkit.

Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course helps you understand the problems that hurt productivity, and gives you tools for creating positive change. This course also guides you through creating the ground rules and structure needed to set your team up for success.

You gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

When taking this course, you will raise your own self-awareness and gain self-confidence for a better leadership.
You will discover a new approach to leadership based on trust and sense.
The “Savoir-Relier” leadership, a new approach of leadership, taught to HEC MBA’s student and top executives, enables better team leadership and encourages relationships between people in spite of their differences of opinion.

You will develop relational skills, self-knowledge and self-awareness on the way to unfold your own leadership style. You’ll learn the skills of The Savoir-Relier (SR) methodology for better connecting with yourself or others by going through the following 4 steps for successful leadership: Introspection, Conversation, Resilience and Responsibility toward Value Creation.
In this first MOOC of the "Inspirational Leadership" specialization, you will practice the first two steps of the method for successful leadership: Introspection and Conversation. You will get to know yourself better during the Introspection part and get a chance to improve your communication skills in order to better interact with others. You will meet people like you who will share their stories and their experience with Savoir-Relier and why it is so inspiring for them in their life. Together, you’ll develop greater self-awareness by developing a leadership self-portrait and going through fun activities to increase your empathy and communication.

Leaders from different organizations and participants of the HEC Paris Leadership Certificate, the program from which this course and specialization are inspired, will share with you their insights about what it takes to become a great leader and what they are able to achieve now that they apply The Savoir-Relier methodology.

This course is part of the specialization “Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense”. In the next courses, you'll go through the second two steps of leadership: Resilience and Responsibility toward Value Creation.

This course aims to prepare you for working in an cross-cultural Business setting. We'll learn about common cross-cultural theories and how they are relevant to everyday business practices in a globalised world. By combining all of your vocabulary, reading, speaking, and writing skills that you acquired in the previous three courses, you will learn how language plays an important role in cross-cultural communication. You will also enhance your cross-cultural understanding and will be able to use vocabulary, tone and style, and spoken and written communication skills within a cross-cultural Business context. Skills learned in this course help prepare you to deliver the professional business presentation in the Capstone project.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

- identify possible cross-cultural issues and misunderstandings in communication
- apply strategies to overcome possible cross-cultural issues and misunderstandings in communication
- produce documents with an appropriate style for business communication purposes within a cross-cultural situation
- deliver a speech with an appropriate style for business communication purposes within a cross-cultural situation

Are you a business executive or a manager who uses English in your career? Then you know that good business communication in English requires focus, vocabulary, and specific linguistic structures. In this course, you will follow along a recently promoted manager as she builds and leads her team to success. Together, you will practice the language and styles of communication needed in English for
• Recruiting and training a professional team to work together with integrity and respect
• Managing and participating in well-organized meetings
• Making telephone conferences more efficient
• Writing professional emails that are easy to read
The activities in this course will give you the opportunity to share your experience and receive immediate feedback from other business professionals around the world.

Get the tools you need to analyze, evaluate and recommend specific actions organizations can take to grow their value and avoid common growth pitfalls. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, you will learn to determine how best to build value, whether by scaling existing markets, entering established markets or creating new markets through innovation and acquisitions.

This is the fourth course in the Data Warehouse for Business Intelligence specialization. Ideally, the courses should be taken in sequence. Effectively and efficiently mining data is the very center of any modern business’s competitive strategy, and a data warehouse is a core component of this data mining. The ability to quickly look back at early trends and have the accurate data – properly formatted – is essential to good decision making. By enabling this historical overview, a data warehouse allows decision makers to learn from past trends and challenges. In essence, the benefit of a data warehouse is continuous improvement.

By the end of the course, you will be able to enhance Conformity And Quality of Data by gaining the knowledge and skills for using data warehouses for business intelligence purposes and for working as a business intelligence developer. You’ll have the opportunity to work with large data sets in a data warehouse environment and will learn the use of MicroStrategy's Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Visualization capabilities to create visualizations and dashboards.

The course gives an overview of how business intelligence technologies can support decision making across any number of business sectors. These technologies have had a profound impact on corporate strategy, performance, and competitiveness and broadly encompass decision support systems, business intelligence systems, and visual analytics. Modules are organized around the business intelligence concepts, tools, and applications, and the use of data warehouse for business reporting and online analytical processing, for creating visualizations and dashboards, and for business performance management and descriptive analytics.

This course is intended for business and computer science university students, IT professionals, program managers, business analysts and anyone with career interests in business intelligence.

In order to be successful in this course, you should have either completed Course 3 of the Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence Specialization or have some prior experience with data visualization and document management.

In this course, you will learn best practices for how to use data analytics to make any company more competitive and more profitable. You will be able to recognize the most critical business metrics and distinguish them from mere data.

You’ll get a clear picture of the vital but different roles business analysts, business data analysts, and data scientists each play in various types of companies. And you’ll know exactly what skills are required to be hired for, and succeed at, these high-demand jobs.

Finally, you will be able to use a checklist provided in the course to score any company on how effectively it is embracing big data culture. Digital companies like Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are transforming entire industries through their creative use of big data. You’ll understand why these companies are so disruptive and how they use data-analytics techniques to out-compete traditional companies.

A Capstone Project is an assignment designed specifically to apply and showcase the skills you learned in the Specialization. To this end, the Business Strategy Capstone Project, a comprehensive Strategic Analysis, provides an opportunity for you to synthesize concepts and knowledge from the four prerequisite courses in the specialization. In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, you will be guided through your project by top-ranked faculty. You may continue with the organization you selected for previous assignments or select a new organization for this project. You will analyze the current state of the organization, strategic issues facing the organization, strategic paths the organization might pursue, make a recommendation of the best path for the organization to pursue, and write an Executive Summary. Your finished project will serve as an artifact showcasing your ability to conduct research on/within an organization, select and apply the most appropriate analytical tools, build a well-supported case for a specific position, and effectively communicate key points with executive leadership.

What is cloud technology or data science and what’s all the hype about? More importantly, what can it do for you, your team, and your business?

If you want to learn about cloud technology so you can excel in your role, help build the future of your business and thrive in the cloud era, then the Business Transformation with Google Cloud course is for you. Through this interactive training, you’ll learn about core cloud business drivers—specifically Google’s cloud—and gain the knowledge/skills to determine if business transformation is right for you and your team, and build short and long-term projects using the “superpowers” of cloud accordingly. You’ll also find several templates, guides, and resource links through the supplementary student workbook to help you build a custom briefing document to share with your leadership, technical teams or partners.

Primary Audience:
Business decision-makers: directors (managers of managers), managers of individual contributors (ICs) or ICs working in non-IT functions/divisions (such as finance, marketing, sales, HR, product design) interested in understanding the applications of Google’s cloud technology for business improvement opportunities and transformational project(s).

Are you satisfied with your career? Where do you see yourself in the future? No matter where you are on your professional journey, careful planning will help you reach your goals. This course will help you adapt to rapidly evolving job markets by enhancing your self-knowledge and confidence to explore wider career opportunities. You will create a career development plan, encompassing your career goals, skills and knowledge development for your current and future jobs, and learn how to make the most of your strengths, talents, and experience. You’ll receive valuable guidance based on practical suggestions, theoretical models and current empirical evidence. Via structured learning activities you will gain an appreciation that career planning and management is an ongoing, rewarding process of assessing career identity, setting new learning goals and career visions, and celebrating accomplishments as you develop.

By the end of this guided project, you will be fluent in identifying, and mapping variables for Gap Analysis using a hands-on example. This will enable you to map business states from the AS IS to the TO BE state which is important in for preparing and managing change in professional and personal life.

Change happens all the time and in being able to identify factors involved in change and preparing to manage change you increase your chances for success . This analysis will help you if you are in:
+ Strategy development
+ Program Management
+ Project Management
+ Business Process Re-Engineering
+ Product Development
+ Organisational Development
And much more. On a personal level this analysis can help you to map where you are and where you want to be for example:
+ Competing in sports
+ Having a professional goal
+ Developing a good habit

Furthermore, this guided project is designed to engage and harness your visionary and exploratory abilities. You will use proven models in change management with Miro to identify the gaps in products/services, and further equip you with the knowledge to utilise the learned concepts, methodologies, and tools to prepare for change in various settings.

By the end of this guided project, you will be fluent in creating a change implementation model using Route Analysis for a hands-on example. This will equip you with a systemic implementation framework for change that can be utilized in professional and personal life.

Change happens all the time, and in being able to identify factors involved in change and developing a model for how to implement change you increase your chances for success. This analysis will help you with:

+ Strategy development
+ Program Management
+ Project Management
+ Business Process Re-Engineering
+ Product Development
+ Organizational Development

Furthermore, this guided project is designed to engage and harness your visionary and exploratory abilities. You will use proven models in change management with Miro to develop your change leadership skills for various settings.

Understand how channel management and retailing can improve performance in your business. Nowadays, a distribution strategy is part of the DNA of many companies and a correct channel management is key for the success of your product. Distribution plans need to be prepared for the long run, combining the following main areas: company profile, portfolio structure and price positioning, go-to-market policy, trade and retail marketing, e-commerce and global retail management.

In the last decade, there have been two main revolutions that have affected industries, increasing the importance of Distribution Channel Management Profesor Maria Teresa Aranzabal guides you through: The IT revolution: considering developments in CRM, supply chain, planning tools, merchandise and reallocation systems, amongst others; and the retail focus: how a clear retail strategy can be a differentiator for companies and a strong weapon of competitiveness.

In this course you will learn how to stay up-to-date on how companies are adding these aspects to their main strategic guidelines and making them key points in their managerial decision-making process. We use interviews with industry experts and give real-life examples of how to ensure your business makes the most of this vital area of marketing.

This course covers practical techniques to elicit and express software requirements from client interactions.

Welcome to Cloud Computing Basics (Cloud 101).

Over the next few weeks, we will discuss the basics of Cloud computing: what it is, what it supports, and how it is delivered. We will delve into storage services, Cloud economics, levels of managed infrastructure, and Azure services. We will also explore different deployment models of Cloud computing, as well as several hosting scenarios. Last but not least, we will compare some of the cloud platforms and discuss the future of cloud computing.

Throughout the Coaching Skills for Managers specialization, we’ve discussed many topics for improving coaching conversations with our employees. It is now time to put all of that theory and discussion into practice and examine great examples of common coaching conversations!

Note: This course builds on all previous courses in the Coaching Skills for Managers specialization. It is highly recommended that students complete or be familiar with the topics covered in those courses before taking this course. In particular, you should be familiar with the coaching strategies and tools discussed in previous courses (such as the 5 whys technique, resisting what is, among others), and should have a full understanding of the Thought model and the various components of it: circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.

By the end of this course, you will be able to demonstrate appropriate and effective strategies when engaging in coaching conversations with those that you lead. By exploring and analyzing common coaching scenarios that are acted out in this course, you will have a great sense of what works well and not so well during such a conversation. Specifically, you'll be able to better differentiate between a developmental coaching approach and a directive management style, discuss new strategies and techniques for dealing with both mind set and skill set gaps, describe how to use the feedback loop effectively in a conversation, and demonstrate the use of good questioning techniques and the thought model to not only help an employee identify issues, but help the employee really change their thinking.

The final assignment is all about actually having a coaching conversation with another person where you can apply everything you've learned in this course and throughout the Coaching Skills for Managers specialization. Again, it is highly recommended students complete the other courses in the specialization before taking this one. This peer review assignment, in particular, will be difficult to complete without knowledge of the topics covered in these courses.

After going through the course materials and completing the assessments, you will be able to have more effective one-on one-coaching meetings with those you manage and deepen your understanding of the essential practice of coaching conversations.

Communication has changed! The traditional rules for speaking and presenting, meeting coordination, influencing people, negotiating and selling ideas no longer apply in a world of skype, messenger, video and teleconference. This course will act as an overview on several concepts each of which could be a course of their own and our goal is to give you tools that you can practice and perfect on your own.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Apply communication principles and techniques for in-person and virtual teams
• Use a science based approach to create impactful presentations
• Refine your communication style to better persuade and influence others
• Run more effective and impactful meetings
• Incorporate strategies to have positive difficult conversations and make people feel valued and listened to

*** This course will require you to record yourself speaking. Therefore you must have a phone/computer with a functional camera and microphone.***

WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE?
Anyone looking for professional and/or leadership development. This class mainly uses examples from the professional, business environment. If you are looking to advance at your current organization or to enhancing your personal value for potential employers this course is for you.

WHAT MAKES THIS COURSE EFFECTIVE?
Many educational experiences describe and explain, but in this course we will apply and demonstrate. We teach practical and proven concepts, show you how to apply them and give you opportunities to practice them in a safe and supportive environment. This course is full of opportunities to put the ideas presented into practice and test their effectiveness for yourself.

WHY SHOULD YOU TAKE THIS COURSE?
We will challenge the preconceived ideas about what it means to be part of a virtual team, and support you to be a dynamic team contributor no matter where you work. In this course you can expect to be both energized and uncomfortable – like in most experiences that result in positive growth and change!

This course is offered through the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies (https://learn.utoronto.ca/).

This course introduces you to the concept of conflict transformation and how it differs from conflict resolution, management, and prevention. We’ll see how conflict offers opportunities for constructive change, and we'll explore different tools and methods for engaging conflict constructively.

Regardless of your familiarity with the topic, you'll get insightful tips, portable handouts, lively demonstrations, and personalized assignments to bridge and enhance your own knowledge and history within the conflict narrative. In any area of your life, you'll benefit from the practical techniques and transferable information offered throughout this five-week journey.

In Course Two of the Art of Sales Specialization, you will learn how to run high-impact meetings that create complete separation between you and everyone else your customer comes into contact with. You will learn the importance of asking better questions and how to anticipate and handle sales objections. Finally, you will learn how to tell powerful stories and to give and receive performance feedback.

This course introduces the types of cost estimation from the conceptual design phase through the more detailed design phase of a construction project. In addition, the course highlights the importance of controlling costs and how to monitor project cash flow. Learners will work on a break-even analysis of construction tasks in a project. The course begins with Professor Odeh providing an overview of what will be covered. Next, learners explore the stages of design in a construction project. Professor Odeh then describes the types of cost estimates in a construction project, and the tools and methods used to create estimates.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
-Acquire the fundamentals of cost estimation and the design phase to perform cost estimation
-Learn about cost control and cost control methods, emphasizing the Earned Value Method or EVM
-Understand the close out period of the project by exploring the punch lists, final approval, and turnover to the client

This course expands the knowledge of a construction project manager to include an understanding of economics and the mathematics of money, an essential component of every construction project. Topics covered include the time value of money, the definition and calculation of the types of interest rates, and the importance of Cash Flow Diagrams.

The course covers these topics in three sections. The first section focuses on the foundation of building the mathematics of money, often referred to as value of money. It also highlights the present value techniques and the internal rate of return from a construction manager point of view.
 
The second section of the course focuses on vertical construction finance and the last part focuses on horizontal construction finance. Under the vertical construction finance, the instructor discusses real estate finance and how that has been done with more in-depth details and gives examples for students to solve with instructions. 

The last topic, horizontal finance, is divided into two parts. To begin, the instructor introduces vast details about public private partnership. This module highlights around three case studies about PPP projects, which would be an introduction to project financing in horizontal work. After introducing case studies, the instructor demonstrates the risks associated with construction finance. After that, similar to the previous three courses, the course finishes with emphasizing the importance of construction finance.

Construction Management is the planning, coordinating, and building of a project from conception to completion. This specialization is intended for Construction industry professionals, engineers, and architects looking to advance their careers. Students interested in learning about construction project management would also benefit from this specialization.

This course focuses on learning how to develop and manage a schedule. The first module provides an overview of the Construction Scheduling course. The second module introduces bar or Gantt charts and how they are used as scheduling tools. During the third module, learners will create activity precedence diagrams, also referred to as activity on node diagrams, which graphically represent the construction activities in a project and their relationships. The fourth module provides an overview of the types of construction activity relationships encountered in a construction project and how to represent them in an activity precedence diagram. Forward and backward pass calculations are covered in the fifth module, and during the sixth module, Professor Odeh discusses the importance of critical paths, including what it is and why it is important.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
-Discover key project scheduling techniques and procedures
-Learn how to develop and manage a schedule, and understand scheduling tools such as bar charts, activity on arrow, and activity on nodes
-Explore the multiple relationships that connect all the construction activities in our project from start to finish
-Learn about creating a network diagram, defining the importance of the critical path in a project network, and defining project activities float
-Understand the fundamentals of bar charts, precedence diagrams, activity on arrow, Program
-Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), range estimating, linear project operations, and the line of balance (LOB)

In the fourth course of the Content Strategy Specialization - Ensuring Your Content's Impact - you will look at visual communication and the ways you can be more effective with your font choices, photography, and video. You'll also dive deeper into social communities to help you understand how these communities form and what you can do to build your role within them. The last module is pivotal for Content Strategists. It will help you to understand how best to measure your content to maximize its effectiveness relative to the time you commit to it.

While this MOOC does share the theoretical elements of Content Strategy, there is a much greater emphasis on its application. Creating trend-worthy headlines and blogs, social media plans, digital measurement templates, video and photography content are all skills you will have in your toolkit by the end of the MOOC, ready to apply at your organization. And speaking of toolkits, we have included one that you can download and take back to work which includes the practical tips from the learnings in this course as well as the previous one on Expanding Your Content's Reach.

Guest lecturers in this course include:
-- Zach Wise, Associate Professor, Medill Northwestern
-- Rich Gordon, Professor & Director of Digital Innovation, Medill, Northwestern
-- Randy Hlavac, Lecturer, Medill, Northwestern (and lead professor of the Social Media Marketing Specialization also on Coursera)

Want your content to go viral? Who doesn't! It takes a thoughtful, integrated approach to make content that stands out in our increasingly oversaturated world. In this fourth course of the Social Marketing Specialization - "Content, Advertising & Social IMC" - you will learn how marketers are successfully navigating today's media landscape. You will learn why developing engaging content for your audience is an essential component in effective social marketing. A panel of experts will unlock the paid/owned/earned media riddle and replace it with an integrated who/what/where approach that utilizes platform-specific messaging to grow your market share. This course also includes an overview of the integrated marketing communications strategy for social and how it is being deployed around the globe, as well as gamification tips to keep your audiences coming back for more. In addition, you will learn the secrets to advertising on Facebook and other social sites.

Additional MOOC 4 faculty include:
* Judy Ungar Franks (President, The Marketing Democracy, Ltd. & Lecturer, Medill Integrated Marketing Communications, Northwestern)
* Steffi Decker (Junior Partner, Chong and Koster)
* Joey Strawn (Director of Integrated Marketing, Industrial Strength Marketing)

This is Course 3 in the Salesforce Sales Development Representative Professional Certificate. In order to successfully complete the course, please ensure you have taken Course 1: Groundwork for Success in Sales Development and Course 2: Foundations for Interviewing with Confidence.

This course will dive into the 8 principles of SV Academy’s Conversational Selling Methodology, which will optimize you for success. You’ll be able to integrate these principles not only in the real world, but in your career. Additionally, you’ll be taught SV Academy’s unique approach to objection handling and framework for high-quality prospecting.

Course 3 in the Sales Development Representative (SDR) Professional Certificate will give you the necessary skills to launch a career in the non-technical side of the tech industry.


By the end of the course, you will be able to:

- Understand the process of asking strategic questions, establishing trust, identifying pain points and proposing value in efforts to closing a sale
- Identify and empathize with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and target persona to build a high-quality lead list, efficiently qualify prospects, and leverage data to drive activity
- Investigate various outreach channels and generate a call script incorporating Conversational Selling strategies
- Develop a foundation for emotional intelligence in a sales context and generate an empathetic email
- Generate a multi-channel sales strategy to outreach prospects via phone, email, video, and social media


To be successful in this course, you should have:

- An ability to communicate in verbal and written form in a way that is accessible and understandable by a general audience (you don’t need to be formal or refined)
- Baseline computer literacy (you must be able to use a word processor, web search, and email)
- Familiarity with social media, including LinkedIn
- Ability and willingness to learn new technology tools
- Motivation to grow personally and professionally
- Hunger for feedback and coaching
- Successfully completed the previous courses in this training

In a very competitive workplace, demonstrating your ability to turn challenges into opportunities is an important to way stand out to hiring managers and to your existing management/leadership. In this course, you will learn how to utilize the knowledge and skills needed to leverage left- and right-brain thinking, analyze problems, spur creativity, and implement innovative ideas for your workplace. Using the power of design thinking and Creative Problem Solving models you will work toward data-driven solutions to workplace challenges. You will engage in an active process of identifying/defining a specific challenge, generating a plan to address the challenge, collecting and analyzing data/information in order to sell your solution to your leadership, implementing your data-driven solution, and evaluating success of the solution.

Course Outcomes:
1. Understand design, out-of-the box, whole brain thinking, Your workplace strengths
2. Apply qualitative and scientific research method for workplace problems, Setting priorities and analyzing for outcomes
3. Apply creative problem solving and creative thinking, using creative techniques to overcome challenges and bring about innovation
4. Create action plan, Learn to implement innovative ideas and present ideas

Please Note: This course is scheduled to close new learner enrollment on November 15th, 2021, and fully close on May 15th, 2022. All graded assignments, including peer reviews, must be completed by May 15th in order to be accepted for Certificate credit.

In this course you will learn how companies decide on how much debt to take, and whether to raise capital from markets or from banks. You will also learn how to measure and manage credit risk and how to deal with financial distress. You will discuss the mechanics of dividends and share repurchases, and how to choose the best way to return cash to investors. You will also learn how to use derivatives and liquidity management to offset specific sources of financial risk, including currency risks. Finally, You will learn how companies finance merger and acquisition decisions, including leveraged buyouts, and how to incorporate large changes in leverage in standard valuation models.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Understand how companies make financing, payout and risk management decisions that create value
• Measure the effects of leverage on profitability, risk, and valuation
• Manage credit risk and financial distress using appropriate financial tools
• Understand the links between payout policies and company performance
• Use derivatives and liquidity management to offset financial risks
• Pick an appropriate financing package for an M&A or leveraged buyout deal

This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

Have you been assigned to manage a project and don’t know how to start capturing all the pertinent information into a succinct and crisp format?

By the end of this project, you will create a master and living document, containing important information that you and stakeholders can refer back to as your project develops.

A Project Charter is a living document that displays core information of a project, such as the project's name, sponsors, problem and goal statements, scope, benefits, and timeline. It is used typically in Lean Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) methodology at the inception of the project, and is consistently referred back to throughout the project’s life, and thereafter.

With minimal software skills, you will be able to categorize this information into a document using a simple table structure. This course will include beginner level skills using Google Docs. Creating a logically organized Project Charter is a great way to not only summarize all the moving parts of your project into one handy document but also to measure your project's success.

Tableau is widely recognized as one of the premier data visualization software programs. For many years access to the program was limited to those who purchased licenses. Recently, Tableau launched a public version that grants the ability to create amazing data visualizations for free. Account members can also share and join projects to collaborate on projects that can change the world.

In this project, we will learn how to create an account, create an Interactive Graph in Tableau and share it with others.

Learning to use this in-demand tool has applications in Marketing, Finance, Operations, Sales, and many other business functions.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

Welcome to this Guided Project on Creating Your First Python Program, From UST.

For more than 20 years, UST has worked side by side with the world’s best companies to make a real impact through transformation. Powered by technology, inspired by people and led by their purpose, they partner with clients from design to operation.

With this Guided Project from UST, you can quickly build in-demand job skills and expand your career opportunities in the Computer Science field by learning the foundational elements of the Python programming language and its basic syntax.

Python is a computer programming language often used to build websites and software, automate tasks, and conduct data analysis. Python is a general purpose language, meaning it can be used to create a variety of different programs and isn’t specialized for any specific problems. This versatility, along with its beginner-friendliness, has made it one of the most-used programming languages today.

Through hands-on, practical experience, you will be guided through concepts that Python Programmers use every day to perform their job duties, like using the Terminal and a Text Editor.

Together, we will explore how to use variables, create functions, lists and conditional statements, as well as utilize For and While loops. You will then apply the concepts to create your first command line application which will manage a To-Do List.

This project is great for learners who are looking to get started with Python programming, and do not have any prior programming experience. By the end of this Guided Project, you should feel more confident about working with the Python language, understanding what it is used for, and have confirmed your skills by creating your own to-do list, which can be used for showing an employer or making your routine daily tasks more efficient through automation.

Ready to become a Programmer? Start learning Python today!

There is mounting concern that organizational groups and teams often fail to learn from their past experiences. It’s pertinent to address this issue as groups and teams are often the main ways that work gets done in organizations.

In this course, we examine the main reasons that groups and teams are often ineffective, which include:
• The lack of organizational structures and support for teams and groups
• The lack of understanding and emphasis on learning
• Misaligned reward structures

So, what can be done to create an enabling learning culture in teams?

This course emphasizes practical and impactful ways to begin to address this state of affairs. Through the use of stories, scenarios with actors simulating different team issues, examples and dialogue, you learn how to:
• Understand teams in their larger organizational context
• Diagnose the learning strengths and barriers to learning on teams
• Identify ways to develop a team and group that continually learns and impacts the larger organization positively
• Create an organizational environment that encourages learning and innovation

In this course you will experience the process of defining, creating, and managing relational database tables using the SQL language. Tables are used as the containers for the data in a database. As such, the structure, or makeup, of each table in a relational database is critical, since it must be designed and created specifically to meet the needs of the data it will contain. The table’s structure indicates which pieces of data are stored in a table, as well as the type and size of each piece of data.

Throughout the course, you’ll be exposed to guidelines and rules that database designers use to make sure that the tables will keep the data as safe and accurate as possible. You’ll learn to use SQL code to incorporate the constraints that help the database management enforce those rules. As you work through and complete hands-on tasks, you’ll become familiar with SQLiteStudio, the database management system used in the course. Tables that are well-designed and created correctly improve data integrity--and make data retrieval easier!

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

This course deals directly with your ability for creativity which is a critical skill in any field. It focuses on divergent thinking, the ability to develop multiple ideas and concepts to solve problems. Through a series of creativity building exercises, short lectures, and readings, learners develop both an understanding of creativity and increase their own ability.

This course will help you understand the role of creativity and innovation in your own work and in other disciplines. It will challenge you to move outside of your existing comfort zone and to recognize the value of that exploration. This course will help you understand the importance of diverse ideas, and to convey that understanding to others.

The principal learning activity in the course is a series of "differents" where you are challenged to identify and change your own cultural, habitual, and normal patterns of behavior. Beginning with a prompt, e.g. "eat something different", you will begin to recognize your own = limits and to overcome them. In addition, you are encouraged to understand that creativity is based on societal norms, and that by it's nature, it will differ from and be discouraged by society. In this course, the persistence of the creative person is developed through practice. At the same time, these exercises are constrained by concerns of safety, legality, and economics, which are addressed in their creative process.

Creativity requires us to collaborate with others, and this course helps you be a better creative collaborator. We need to be able to pitch our creative ideas so that others are excited rather than baffled or dismissive by them. We need to be able to evaluate the ideas of others so we identify rather than miss creative solutions. We need to be able to work with our teams such that creativity thrives rather than is suppressed. This course addresses each of these needs, identifying challenges and providing guidance for effective performance. The end result is guidance on how to foster effective creative collaboration.

You will be able to:

-Design pitches for innovative ideas to build excitement and clarity
-Evaluate the pitches of others to identify great new ideas
-Lead groups to foster effective collaboration for innovation

This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.

‘Critical Path Analysis Using Lucidchart ” guided project is for anyone who wants to learn the Critical Path Method for project schedule planning. This project will benefit professionals wanting to broaden their knowledge and skillset in the area of project management. Project Coordinators and entry-level managers seeking to obtain project management certifications will also find this project complementary to their studies. To complete the project you will need a Lucidchart account. In this project we are going to focus on three main learning objectives: creating a Precedence Diagram using Lucidchart, learning how to use the Critical Path Method for project planning, and performing Critical Path calculations. By the end of the project, you will learn how to create a precedence diagram using Lucidchart and will be able to perform critical path calculations to analyze your project schedule.

Have you ever tried to find a solution to a problem only to realize you’ve been focusing on the wrong problem from the very beginning? Or you’ve proposed a solution only to have it shut down by your boss or coworkers? How stressful and defeating is that? With massive changes in our world that seem to create the most difficult of circumstances, both personally and professionally, your skills as a critical thinker and problem solver need to be further developed now more than ever.

By the end of this course you will have learned and memorized a practical model to solve problems on your own and with others. These 7 critical steps will ensure that you have looked at a problem from every angle and considered multiple solutions. In fact, this dynamic and holistic approach will help you solve problems once and for all!

We now live in a truly global, interconnected world in which every manager requires a high level of cultural intelligence. In a diverse work environment, a successful leader must understand the cultural backgrounds, beliefs and attitudes of the people around them – or run the risk of failing to achieve the organisation’s goals. This course, via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts, industry interviews and written assessments), will teach you that those with high ‘cultural intelligence’ – are good at spotting cultural differences and adapt their behaviour accordingly. You’ll develop cultural intelligence and sensitivity – key future-focused capabilities required of every leader.

In Course 1, we set the foundation for the Art of Sales Specialization and offer a new mindset for becoming a high-performer in sales. We will discuss the Knowledge, Skill and Discipline that you need to stand out in your industry, and create a goal for you to reach by the end of the specialization. Finally, you will learn how to talk about yourself and your business. You will build your personal Sales Trailer and learn how to get into and out of sales conversations quickly and effectively.

About the Specialization:
The purpose of this Specialization is to make you as efficient and effective in selling as possible. You will gain several critical skills and disciplines that will accelerate your success with your small or large company and your life. The ability to sell is a necessity in this world. Whether it’s standing out in a crowd, selling yourself to a new employer, or winning new customers; selling is something we do every day, and we should be great at it! This Specialization is designed as an adventure of discovery. You will be tested, taught and transformed through a series of lectures, discussions and exercises that are designed to push you up and out of your comfort zone. You will learn how to target and acquire customers and get them to fall in love..

This course introduces students to data and statistics. By the end of the course, students should be able to interpret descriptive statistics, causal analyses and visualizations to draw meaningful insights.

The course first introduces a framework for thinking about the various purposes of statistical analysis. We’ll talk about how analysts use data for descriptive, causal and predictive inference. We’ll then cover how to develop a research study for causal analysis, compute and interpret descriptive statistics and design effective visualizations. The course will help you to become a thoughtful and critical consumer of analytics.

If you are in a field that increasingly relies on data-driven decision making, but you feel unequipped to interpret and evaluate data, this course will help you develop these fundamental tools of data literacy.

This course teaches you to fetch and process data from services on the Internet. It covers Python list comprehensions and provides opportunities to practice extracting from and processing deeply nested data. You'll also learn how to use the Python requests module to interact with REST APIs and what to look for in documentation of those APIs. For the final project, you will construct a “tag recommender” for the flickr photo sharing site.

The course is well-suited for you if you have already taken the "Python Basics" and "Python Functions, Files, and Dictionaries" courses (courses 1 and 2 of the Python 3 Programming Specialization). If you are already familiar with Python fundamentals but want practice at retrieving and processing complex nested data from Internet services, you can also benefit from this course without taking the previous two.

This is the third of five courses in the Python 3 Programming Specialization.

The Data Science for Business Innovation nano-course is a compendium of the must-have expertise in data science for executives and middle-management to foster data-driven innovation. The course explains what Data Science is and why it is so hyped.

You will learn:
* the value that Data Science can create
* the main classes of problems that Data Science can solve
* the difference is between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics
* the roles of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

From a more technical perspective, the course covers supervised, unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, and explains what can be obtained with classification, clustering, and regression techniques. It discusses the role of NoSQL data models and technologies, and the role and impact of scalable cloud-based computation platforms. All topics are covered with example-based lectures, discussing use cases, success stories, and realistic examples.

Following this nano-course, if you wish to further deepen your data science knowledge, you can attend the Data Science for Business Innovation live course https://professionalschool.eitdigital.eu/data-science-for-business-innovation

Have you ever had the perfect data science experience? The data pull went perfectly. There were no merging errors or missing data. Hypotheses were clearly defined prior to analyses. Randomization was performed for the treatment of interest. The analytic plan was outlined prior to analysis and followed exactly. The conclusions were clear and actionable decisions were obvious. Has that every happened to you? Of course not. Data analysis in real life is messy. How does one manage a team facing real data analyses? In this one-week course, we contrast the ideal with what happens in real life. By contrasting the ideal, you will learn key concepts that will help you manage real life analyses.

This is a focused course designed to rapidly get you up to speed on doing data science in real life. Our goal was to make this as convenient as possible for you without sacrificing any essential content. We've left the technical information aside so that you can focus on managing your team and moving it forward.

After completing this course you will know how to:

1, Describe the “perfect” data science experience
2. Identify strengths and weaknesses in experimental designs
3. Describe possible pitfalls when pulling / assembling data and learn solutions for managing data pulls.
4. Challenge statistical modeling assumptions and drive feedback to data analysts
5. Describe common pitfalls in communicating data analyses
6. Get a glimpse into a day in the life of a data analysis manager.

The course will be taught at a conceptual level for active managers of data scientists and statisticians. Some key concepts being discussed include:
1. Experimental design, randomization, A/B testing
2. Causal inference, counterfactuals,
3. Strategies for managing data quality.
4. Bias and confounding
5. Contrasting machine learning versus classical statistical inference

Course promo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BIYmw5wnBI

Course cover image by Jonathan Gross. Creative Commons BY-ND https://flic.kr/p/q1vudb

Despite the recent increase in computing power and access to data over the last couple of decades, our ability to use the data within the decision making process is either lost or not maximized at all too often, we don't have a solid understanding of the questions being asked and how to apply the data correctly to the problem at hand.

This course has one purpose, and that is to share a methodology that can be used within data science, to ensure that the data used in problem solving is relevant and properly manipulated to address the question at hand.

Accordingly, in this course, you will learn:
- The major steps involved in tackling a data science problem.
- The major steps involved in practicing data science, from forming a concrete business or research problem, to collecting and analyzing data, to building a model, and understanding the feedback after model deployment.
- How data scientists think!

"A picture is worth a thousand words". We are all familiar with this expression. It especially applies when trying to explain the insight obtained from the analysis of increasingly large datasets. Data visualization plays an essential role in the representation of both small and large-scale data.

One of the key skills of a data scientist is the ability to tell a compelling story, visualizing data and findings in an approachable and stimulating way. Learning how to leverage a software tool to visualize data will also enable you to extract information, better understand the data, and make more effective decisions.

The main goal of this Data Visualization with Python course is to teach you how to take data that at first glance has little meaning and present that data in a form that makes sense to people. Various techniques have been developed for presenting data visually but in this course, we will be using several data visualization libraries in Python, namely Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Folium.

LIMITED TIME OFFER: Subscription is only $39 USD per month for access to graded materials and a certificate.

In this project-based course, you will follow your own interests to create a portfolio worthy single-frame viz or multi-frame data story that will be shared on Tableau Public. You will use all the skills taught in this Specialization to complete this project step-by-step, with guidance from your instructors along the way. You will first create a project proposal to identify your goals for the project, including the question you wish to answer or explore with data. You will then find data that will provide the information you are seeking. You will then import that data into Tableau and prepare it for analysis. Next you will create a dashboard that will allow you to explore the data in depth and identify meaningful insights. You will then give structure to your data story by writing the story arc in narrative form. Finally, you will consult your design checklist to craft the final viz or data story in Tableau. This is your opportunity to show the world what you’re capable of - so think big, and have confidence in your skills!

By the end of this project, you will be able to define product vision with user experience maps in Miro.

To understand the User Experience design principles and create a visualization that defines the product vision, you will gain hands-on experience exercising empathy to accurately document the user experience (UX). You will also leverage design thinking, user interface (UI) knowledge, and context from the user’s experience as you create a map in the Miro online visual collaboration platform for teamwork.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

The capstone course, Design and Build a Data Warehouse for Business Intelligence Implementation, features a real-world case study that integrates your learning across all courses in the specialization. In response to business requirements presented in a case study, you’ll design and build a small data warehouse, create data integration workflows to refresh the warehouse, write SQL statements to support analytical and summary query requirements, and use the MicroStrategy business intelligence platform to create dashboards and visualizations.

In the first part of the capstone course, you’ll be introduced to a medium-sized firm, learning about their data warehouse and business intelligence requirements and existing data sources. You’ll first architect a warehouse schema and dimensional model for a small data warehouse. You’ll then create data integration workflows using Pentaho Data Integration to refresh your data warehouse. Next, you’ll write SQL statements for analytical query requirements and create materialized views to support summary data management. For data integration workflows and analytical queries, you can use either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Finally, you will use MicroStrategy OLAP capabilities to gain insights into your data warehouse. In the completed project, you’ll have built a small data warehouse containing a schema design, data integration workflows, analytical queries, materialized views, dashboards and visualizations that you’ll be proud to show to your current and prospective employers.

In this project-centered course*, you will create a content-rich infographic on a topic of your choice using Adobe Illustrator (which you can download for a free, 30-day trial). You might choose to create a visual representation of data from the world of sports, entertainment, politics, or science, to explain a business trend or environmental issue, or even to present a theme or development from your personal life. Your finished infographic will engage your target audience and convey information clearly through effective use of design elements such as typography, color, and structure.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, a writer or the intern in the department, you’ll learn:
• what an infographic is and what makes a good one
• how to work within your limits
• how to work with a team (if you have one)
• why infographics are effective
• techniques for spotting data in stories
• six valuable steps for planning an effective infographic
• how to use and make some of the building blocks of infographics: maps, charts and flow charts
• ways data can be visualized to clarify it and give it meaning
• how to effectively design a good infographic by effectively using elements like type, color and an underlying grid structure
• some free or cheap, online tools for making various kinds of infographics

As you work on your project, you’ll learn more about why infographics are effective, what makes a good infographic, and how to plan and design an infographic for maximum impact. You’ll explore various approaches to data visualization, and you’ll practice creating visualizations like maps, charts, flow charts, and simple drawings in your free version of Adobe Illustrator. Please note that if you are new to learning graphics software, making these graphics could take much longer than estimated as you learn and grow.

What you’ll need to get started:
This project-based course is aimed at anyone interested in understanding, designing, and using infographics - from students and hobbyists to professional graphic designers.

We’ll use Adobe Illustrator for some components of the project. If you don’t have access to the full version of Illustrator,you can download a free version at www.Adobe.com/Illustrator. If the free 30-day trial runs out, you can "purchase" it for a month for about $20.

*About Project-Centered Courses: Project centered courses are designed specifically to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of like-minded learners providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share. When you enroll in certain courses, you’ll be asked to pay a small fee to share your work with others for peer review.

This course extends object-oriented analysis and design by incorporating design patterns to create interactive applications. Through a survey of established design patterns, you will gain a foundation for more complex software applications. Finally, you will identify problematic software designs by referencing a catalog of code smells.

You will be challenged in the Capstone Project to redesign an existing Java-based Android application to implement a combination of design patterns. You will also critique a given Java codebase for code smells.

After completing this course, you will be able to:
• Demonstrate how to use design patterns to address user interface design issues.
• Identify the most suitable design pattern to address a given application design problem.
• Apply design principles (e.g., open-closed, dependency inversion, least knowledge).
• Critique code by identifying and refactoring anti-patterns.
• Apply the model-view-controller architectural pattern.

What makes an interface intuitive? How can I tell whether one design works better than another? This course will teach you fundamental principles of design and how to effectively evaluate your work with users. You'll learn fundamental principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn principles of perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design. And you'll learn how to perform and analyze controlled experiments online. In many cases, we'll use Web design as the anchoring domain. A lot of the examples will come from the Web, and we'll talk just a bit about Web technologies in particular. When we do so, it will be to support the main goal of this course, which is helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology.

Today innovation is everyone's business. Whether you are a manager in a global corporation, an entrepreneur starting up, in a government role, or a teacher in an elementary school, everyone is expected to get lean – to do better with less. And that is why we all need design thinking. At every level in every kind of organization, design thinking provides the tools you need to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there – you're just not seeing them yet.

In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, we provide an overview of design thinking and work with a model containing four key questions and several tools to help you understand design thinking as a problem solving approach. We also look at several stories from different organizations that used design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.

This course is for entrepreneurial managers who are looking for tools and techniques to introduce exciting, innovative products or services to market quickly and informed by high-quality customer insights. It is applicable to a range of organizations from small-medium sized enterprises through to corporates, and across a range of industrial segments.

The problem this course helps address is the constant pressure managers face to be innovative and introduce novel products and services for their customers. However, many creative ideas get ‘stuck’ in the boardroom or are subject to intra-organizational tensions or group think. This course provides methodologies to break through these challenges.

We build on the widely known concept of design thinking but update it and apply it to advance business strategy and entrepreneurship. Over five weeks you will learn what ‘design strategy’ is, how it differs from traditional design thinking and business strategy, and how it can be used to improve existing products or services in your business, or introduce breakthrough ideas.

We will also provide an exclusive, deep-dive into the practical application and impact of these strategies in one of Australia’s newest, most innovative financial institutions, UBank, and the global re-insurance giant, Swiss Re. Through conversations with their Senior Executive Leadership Teams, including UBank’s CEO, we will explore how they have embedded innovation through design thinking. By the end of this course, you will have a set of tools to inform product design and development for your own start-up, or to extend the product roadmap of an established organization.

Organizations are complex and can be difficult to manage well, so managers need tools to help them better understand and deal with the many complexities and challenges associated with organizational life. In this course, you will learn theories, principles, and frameworks that will help you design more effective organizations.
You will be able to:
- Analyze organizations from multiple perspectives to better understand business challenges
- Strategically plan for effective organizational governance
- Develop systems to plan for growth and change
- Understand implications of the external environment on business and strategically respond to these factors

This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.

By the end of this project, you will be able to create an accurate customer problem statement that diagrams the problem that your brand or product will solve for the customer. The power of creating a customer problem statement is that it becomes business intelligence that can maximize business opportunities by solving user experience problems. It does this by expanding upon the knowledge of the customer’s user experience by empathizing with the customer and the challenges or needs they must meet as a part of their normal life journey.

In your project you will understand the benefits and use cases for customer problem statements while developing your own customer problem statement geared toward solving user experience or UX problems. To do this, you will gain hands-on experience applying design thinking, user experience knowledge, and context from the customer journey to build a visualization of a customer problem statement in the Miro online visual collaboration platform for teamwork.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

In this course, you will further examine how businesses create value for customers. In Marketing Management I, you learned the major elements of the marketing mix - product policy, channels of distribution, communication, and pricing - and saw how they fit within different analytical frameworks that are useful to managers. In this course, you will complete a more detailed analysis of these elements in order to conduct a thorough strategic analysis of marketing opportunities and to communicate marketing decisions. This will enable you to see “marketing in action” in the business world.

You will be able to:

• Define all elements of the marketing mix and explain the role each element plays in creating value
• Compare different pricing models
• Evaluate the use of different channels of distribution by existing businesses
• Critique advertising execution
• Create a persuasive advertising piece

This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM. Learn more about admission into these programs and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https://degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.

In this course, you will learn how businesses create value for customers. We will examine the process by which Marketing builds on a comprehensive understanding of buyer behavior to create value. You will learn the major elements of the marketing mix -- product policy, channels of distribution, communication, and pricing -- and see how they fit within different analytical frameworks that are useful to managers. This will enhance your understanding of how marketing works in the business world.
You will be able to:
• Define marketing and describe how marketing creates value
• Describe the elements of the marketing mix
• Explain how these elements interact to create value for consumers
• Use different analytical frameworks to examine how managers solve business problems
• Evaluate brand extensions
• Develop a marketing plan proposal

Now that you have undergone personal information, you will be better prepared to empathize, understand, and mentor individual members of your team on a similar journey. Leading teams towards change-resilience is not as simple as knowing and understanding the psychology of individuals multiplied by a number of team members. It requires a different approach.

In this course, you will learn what influences human behavior in teams by looking at social psychology. You will evaluate your team’s level of change resilience and agility, and you will be applying practical tools for building Agile teams by applying Scrum project management framework.

You won’t stop there, you will learn how to be a servant leader. You will learn practical tools for organizing, leading, and facilitating a Scrum team.

Parts of the content are written from a Scrum Master perspective, and even though you will not be able to use it as a Scrum Master certification, I will be sharing tools and best practices learned through my own experience of being a Scrum Master.

This course assists aspiring and active entrepreneurs in developing great ideas into great companies. With strong economies presenting rich opportunities for new venture creation, and challenging economic times presenting the necessity for many to make their own job, the need to develop the skills to develop and act on innovative business opportunities is increasingly vital.

Using proven content, methods, and models for new venture opportunity assessment and analysis, you will learn how to:

* Identify and analyze entrepreneurial opportunities;
* Enhance your entrepreneurial mindset;
* Improve your strategic decision-making; and
* Build innovative business models.

Our goal is to demystify the startup process, and to help you build the skills to identify and act on innovative opportunities now, and in the future.

With this course, students experience a sampling of the ideas and techniques explored in the University of Maryland's master's degree in technology entrepreneurship, an innovative, 100% online program. Learn more at http://mte.umd.edu/landing.

This course is designed for professionals interested in learning the principles of Lean Sigma, the DMAIC process and DFSS. This course is number 8 of 8 in this specialization dealing with topics in Design for Six Sigma

Professionals with some completed coursework in statistics and a desire to drive continuous improvement within their organizations would find this course and the others in this specialization appealing.

Method of assessment consists of several formative and summative quizzes and a multi-part peer reviewed project completion regiment.

Welcome to Digital Transformation Strategy! As you probably know, this is the first course in a three part specialization focused on the digital transformation of finance. We'll aim to bring you insights about how digitalization intersects with finance, culled from one of the world's top regions for digital innovation. I'm excited to have you in the class and look forward to helping you learn more about this important topic.

To begin, I recommend taking a few minutes to explore the course site. A good place to start is the navigation bar on the left. Click Course Content to see what material we’ll cover each week, as well preview the assignments you’ll need to complete to pass the course. Click Discussions to see forums where you can discuss the course material with fellow students taking the class. Be sure to introduce yourself to everyone in the Meet and Greet forum!

This course should take about four weeks to complete. You can check out the recommended course schedule below to see a quick overview of the lessons and assignments you’ll complete each week.

By the time you finish this course, you’ll have mastered the transformational forces of digitalization and the new competitive dynamics it gives rise to, learned from leading financial companies and seen inspirational examples from the digital masters. You'll be introduced to the Capstone Project for the specialization and have a chance to form some preliminary solutions for a financial company seeking a new strategy for the digital age of finance.

Good luck as you get started. I look forward to seeing you in class!

The proliferation of digital technology gives businesses an unprecedented and diverse new set of tools to reach, engage, monitor, and respond to consumers. The aggregated and voluminous digital data can also be leveraged to better target specific consumer segments. Following “Digital Media and Marketing Principles,” this course aims to give you a deeper understanding of core processes of planning a digital marketing campaign and the role of various digital channels in integrated marketing communication.
You will be able to:
- Adopt a holistic and integrated approach to digital marketing planning
- Develop a purposeful content marketing strategy to achieve your business and marketing goals
- Effectively mix paid, earned, owned, and shared media channels to discover, reach, and engage your customers
- Critically evaluate the role social media platforms play in viral and influencer marketing campaigns
- Evaluate and measure the success of digital marketing campaigns
- Identify and manage risks in digital marketing

Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying.

Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time.

This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to:

Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1)
Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2)
Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3)
Manage and amplify existing products (week 4)

This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods.

Please note that there are new additions to this course and subtitles for these videos will soon be available.

This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

Digital transformation is a hot topic--but what exactly is it and what does it mean for companies? In this course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, and led by top-ranked Darden faculty and Boston Consulting Group global management experts, we talk about digital transformation in two ways. First we discuss the pace of change and the imperative it creates for businesses. Next we provide the context for this transformation and what it takes to win in the digital age. Then we walk through BCG's proprietary framework, which helps you identify key areas to digitize, including strategy, core processes, and technology.

By the end of this course, you'll be able to:
--describe the underlying economics of innovation, technology, and market disruptions
--weigh the pros and cons of current digital technologies driving advancement
--utilize BCG's digital transformation framework as a "how-to" for digitizing your organization

The last three or four decades have seen a remarkable evolution in the institutions that comprise the modern monetary system. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 is a wakeup call that we need a similar evolution in the analytical apparatus and theories that we use to understand that system. Produced and sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, this course is an attempt to begin the process of new economic thinking by reviving and updating some forgotten traditions in monetary thought that have become newly relevant.

Three features of the new system are central.

Most important, the intertwining of previously separate capital markets and money markets has produced a system with new dynamics as well as new vulnerabilities. The financial crisis revealed those vulnerabilities for all to see. The result was two years of desperate innovation by central banking authorities as they tried first this, and then that, in an effort to stem the collapse.

Second, the global character of the crisis has revealed the global character of the system, which is something new in postwar history but not at all new from a longer time perspective. Central bank cooperation was key to stemming the collapse, and the details of that cooperation hint at the outlines of an emerging new international monetary order.

Third, absolutely central to the crisis was the operation of key derivative contracts, most importantly credit default swaps and foreign exchange swaps. Modern money cannot be understood separately from modern finance, nor can modern monetary theory be constructed separately from modern financial theory. That's the reason this course places dealers, in both capital markets and money markets, at the very center of the picture, as profit-seeking suppliers of market liquidity to the new system of market-based credit.

Problem-solving and effective decision-making are essential skills in today’s fast-paced and ever-changing workplace. Both require a systematic yet creative approach to address today’s business concerns. This course will teach an overarching process of how to identify problems to generate potential solutions and how to apply decision-making styles in order to implement and assess those solutions. Through this process, you will gain confidence in assessing problems accurately, selecting the appropriate decision-making approaches for the situation at hand, making team decisions, and measuring the success of the solution’s implementation. Using case studies and situations encountered by class members, you will explore proven, successful problem-solving and decision-making models and methods that can be readily transferred to workplace projects.

Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
1. Identify key terms, styles, and approaches to effective problem-solving and decision-making
2. Explain both the affordances and limitations associated with problem-solving and decision-making
3. Reflect on how mindset and personal bias influence your ability to solve problems and make decisions
4. Explain and discuss how organizational decisions or non-decisions impact personal development, team dynamics, and company-wide performance
5. Articulate how both good and bad team decisions can benefit your professional growth

In this third course in the Social Marketing Specialization - "The Engagement & Nurture Marketing Strategies" - you will learn two of the most effective social strategies used by organizations today. You'll see real-world best practice examples and learn what metrics they use to gauge success. You will also learn the importance of infographics and the impact a well-designed landing page can have on your bottom line. All of the social skills you have learned thus far will be put into action with a multimedia filter and focus blog that you will create to demonstrate how social can enable real-time marketing results. After this MOOC, you will have developed a plan to reach your target consumer markets and know when it is best to either use or avoid specific social marketing strategies.

Additional MOOC 3 faculty include:
* Randy Krum (Data Visualization & Infographics Designer | Consultant | Author | Speaker | President, InfoNewt)
* Stanford Smith (CEO, Pushing Social)
* Andy Crestodina (Co-Founder & Strategic Director, Orbit Media Studios)
* Ellen Valentine (Veteran Marketing Leader & Evangelist, Silverpop, IBM)

In "Engaging in Persuasive and Credible Communication", you will learn the key skill of persuasion, in the context of professional communication in a globalised world.

Persuasive communication is essential to any professional workplace. From a simple email request for your colleague to help you, to developing a presentation for the board of directors, these are acts of communication that require a good degree of persuasion. Even the process of entering the workforce requires effective persuasive communication, for in the act of writing your resume, cover-letter, or in the interview process, you are essentially persuading the potential employer to hire you.

By the end of this course, you will be able to structure and express your ideas in a convincing and persuasive manner in writing, apply basic principles of persuasive writing to convince different sets of audiences at the globalised workplace, and learn to engage in persuasive and credible communication across different cultures in a complex globalised environment.

Agile embraces change which means that team should be able to effectively make changes to the system as team learns about users and market. To be good at effectively making changes to the system, teams need to have engineering rigor and excellence else embracing change becomes very painful and expensive.

In this course, you will learn about engineering practices and processes that agile and traditional teams use to make sure the team is prepared for change. In additional, you will also learn about practices, techniques and processes that can help team build high quality software. You will also learn how to calculate a variety of quantitative metrics related to software quality.

This is an intermediate course, intended for learners with a background in software development. To succeed in the course, you should have experience developing in modern programming languages (e.g., Java, C#, Python, JavaScript), an understanding of software development lifecycle models, familiarity with UML diagrams (class and sequence diagrams), and a desire to better understand quality aspects of software development beyond program correctness.

At the end of this course, you will be able to comfortably and effectively participate in various techniques and processes for building secure and high quality software.

The goal of the course is to give you the tools to initiate a project plan, manage both stakeholders and relationships, organize their team, develop a project charter, and build a business case for a project.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

- Perform a project assessment using information from previous projects and lessons learned
- Identify key deliverables based on business requirements while managing customer expectations
- Perform a stakeholder analysis and create a management plan
- Analyze and develop a project organization
- Create a project charter
- Explain the business case for a project and calculate Net Present Value
- Inform stakeholders of the charter and ensure all parties know the deliverables and expectations

As part of the course, you will prepare organization charts, create a Stakeholder Register, and write a Project Charter based on an engineering project in a provided Case Study. The Stakeholder Register will outline the key parties to the project, their concerns and how you will manage their expectations. Your Project Charter will provide the key guidance your team needs to understand the scope, requirements and purpose for the project.

All of this will position you for initiating and planning your first project and/or understanding how you can maximize your contributions on your next project team.

Rice Center for Engineering Leadership is a Registered Education Provider through the Project Management Institute (PMI)®. Learners who complete this course on the Certificate track will be awarded 12 hours of Profession Development Units. These are recognized by PMI for continuing education or can be applied toward the 35 hours of education required for the Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification.

PMI and PMP are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Scope, time, and cost management are at the heart of successful project management. This course will give you the tools to develop a project scope, schedule and budget and then status them to predict project performance. Throughout the course, you will learn about change management and techniques to implement it.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Create a requirements document
• Create a Project Scope Statement
• Identify ways to control the scope of the project
• Decompose the work and develop work packages
• Create a Work Breakdown Structure
• Develop a Critical Path Schedule
• Review types of cost estimates and identify whether they are “top down or bottom up”
• Review budgets, contingencies and reserves
• Calculate planned and earned values to compare with actual cost
• Perform a cost and schedule analysis

Each week you will prepare a key deliverable for the project plan based on a provided Case Study. These deliverables include:

• Project Scope Statement
• Project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and WBS dictionary
• Critical Path schedule sequence diagram
• Bar Chart Schedule (Gantt Chart)
• Project Cost Estimate
• Project Status using an Earned Value Calculation

All of this will position you to set up a plan to control your next assignment or your next project whether this is as the project manager or as an area leader.

Rice Center for Engineering Leadership is a Registered Education Provider through the Project Management Institute (PMI)®. Learners who complete this course on the Certificate track will be awarded 14 hours of Profession Development Units. These are recognized by PMI for continuing education or can be applied toward the 35 hours of education required for the Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification.

PMI and PMP are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

This course aims to improve your Business English writing skills by developing your use of vocabulary, grammar, understanding of different business writing genres, and your ability to write professional business documents. Skills learned in this course will be used in the cross-cultural communications course and help prepare you to produce the professional business documents in the Capstone project.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

- write business emails
- write an executive summary
- write persuasively in English
- adapt content to purpose, context and audience
- use appropriate style and tone of writing for business purposes

An entrepreneur is someone who is always on the lookout for problems that can be turned into opportunities and finds creative ways to leverage limited resources to reach their goals. In this course, learners will be introduced to the fundamental concepts, theories, and frameworks of entrepreneurship and learn how to apply them within the context of the world's largest market: China. Through cases, articles, and experiential learning, learners will gain expertise in how to identify and evaluate opportunities; interpret, analyze, and build financial models to enable high-growth ventures; practice living life as an entrepreneurial leader; and create a new product or service for the Chinese market.

This course will explore the earlier stages of the entrepreneurial venture process across four modules. The modules will examine the nature of growth and error in entrepreneurial settings and how to manage resources in those settings. In addition, the modules will explore the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities, the formulation of ideas in relation to those opportunities, and how those opportunities and ideas influence entrepreneurial phenomena. Finally, the course will focus on how business concepts underlie compelling entrepreneurial missions that provide guidance to the evolution of a venture’s business model and future strategic planning.

You will be able to:

- Develop a foundational understanding of the entrepreneurial process
- Consider the relationship between growth and error
- Understand how particular opportunities influence entrepreneurial phenomenal

This course builds on previous concepts and outlines strategies and tactics for forming, financing, and launching a new venture. Topics to be addressed will include building the new venture’s initial management team, identifying and reaching out to early customers, developing financial plans, raising startup and initial growth financing, and preparing for and managing rapid growth.
You will be able to:
- Develop an understanding of what is required in a new venture
- Create a plan to identify and approach your first customers
- Build financial projections for the new venture
- Understand how to raise equity capital for the new venture
- Monitor the health and scalability of a new venture

This course offers an action-oriented introduction to Giving Voice to Values (or GVV), an exciting new approach to values-driven leadership development in the workplace, in business education and in life.

GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical, but instead it starts from the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, but that we also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively. Through positive, real life examples, pre-scripting, rehearsal and peer coaching, GVV builds the skill, the confidence and likelihood that we will act on our values more often and more successfully. Based on research and practice, with over 1,000 pilots in educational settings and companies on all seven continents, GVV helps answer the questions: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”

This course was developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and is taught by top-ranked faculty. You will come away from GVV with an expanded toolkit, as well as practice, in a variety of methods and techniques for voicing and enacting your own values and principles. You will develop and practice leadership skills in "peer coaching” with other learners. Through cases and stories based on recognizable workplace, classroom and life values conflicts, you will apply the GVV techniques and “re-frames”, expanding your repertoire for possible action as well as identifying and rehearsing responses that are likely to be most effective. Through this practice, you will gain greater confidence and competence in voicing and enacting your values effectively.

The second course of the specialization EVALUATING PROBLEMS will show you how humans think and how to utilize different disciplinary approaches to tackle problems more effectively. It advances your knowledge of your own field by teaching you to look at it in new ways.

EVALUATING PROBLEMS is constructed in the following way: Week I. “Thinking about Thinking” – How problem solving evolved in nature, how the mechanics of our brains work, and the psychological biases that can emerge when we think. Week II. “Philosophy, Science, and Problem Solving” – How humans have historically approached problem solving, from ancient times to the present. Week III. “Approaching Problems in the Natural Sciences” – How people in the natural sciences deconstruct problems. Week IV. “Statistics and Problem Solving” – How statistics can be used to evaluate problems and think critically. Week V. “Approaching Problems in the Humanities” – How people in the social sciences and humanities deconstruct problems. Week VI. “Evaluating the Anthropocene” – How to evaluate the problems of the Anthropocene.

This is a basic course in designing experiments and analyzing the resulting data. The course objective is to learn how to plan, design and conduct experiments efficiently and effectively, and analyze the resulting data to obtain objective conclusions. Both design and statistical analysis issues are discussed. Opportunities to use the principles taught in the course arise in all aspects of today’s industrial and business environment. Applications from various fields will be illustrated throughout the course. Computer software packages (JMP, Design-Expert, Minitab) will be used to implement the methods presented and will be illustrated extensively.
All experiments are designed experiments; some of them are poorly designed, and others are well-designed. Well-designed experiments allow you to obtain reliable, valid results faster, easier, and with fewer resources than with poorly-designed experiments. You will learn how to plan, conduct and analyze experiments efficiently in this course.

This first course in the IBM Machine Learning Professional Certificate introduces you to Machine Learning and the content of the professional certificate. In this course you will realize the importance of good, quality data. You will learn common techniques to retrieve your data, clean it, apply feature engineering, and have it ready for preliminary analysis and hypothesis testing.


By the end of this course you should be able to:
Retrieve data from multiple data sources: SQL, NoSQL databases, APIs, Cloud 
Describe and use common feature selection and feature engineering techniques
Handle categorical and ordinal features, as well as missing values
Use a variety of techniques for detecting and dealing with outliers
Articulate why feature scaling is important and use a variety of scaling techniques
 
Who should take this course?
This course targets aspiring data scientists interested in acquiring hands-on experience  with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in a business setting.
 
What skills should you have?
To make the most out of this course, you should have familiarity with programming on a Python development environment, as well as fundamental understanding of Calculus, Linear Algebra, Probability, and Statistics.

In this 2-hour long project-based course, you will learn how to perform Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) in Python. You will use external Python packages such as Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib, Seaborn etc. to conduct univariate analysis, bivariate analysis, correlation analysis and identify and handle duplicate/missing data.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

Producing visualizations is an important first step in exploring and analyzing real-world data sets. As such, visualization is an indispensable method in any data scientist's toolbox. It is also a powerful tool to identify problems in analyses and for illustrating results.In this project-based course, we will employ the statistical data visualization library, Seaborn, to discover and explore the relationships in the Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) Data Set. We will cover key concepts in exploratory data analysis (EDA) using visualizations to identify and interpret inherent relationships in the data set, produce various chart types including histograms, violin plots, box plots, joint plots, pair grids, and heatmaps, customize plot aesthetics and apply faceting methods to visualize higher dimensional data.

This course runs on Coursera's hands-on project platform called Rhyme. On Rhyme, you do projects in a hands-on manner in your browser. You will get instant access to pre-configured cloud desktops containing all of the software and data you need for the project. Everything is already set up directly in your internet browser so you can just focus on learning. For this project, you’ll get instant access to a cloud desktop with Python, Jupyter, and scikit-learn pre-installed.

Notes:
- You will be able to access the cloud desktop 5 times. However, you will be able to access instructions videos as many times as you want.
- This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

In this course, you will learn foundations of financial accounting information. You will start your journey with a general overview of what financial accounting information is and the main financial statements. You will then learn how to code financial transactions in financial accounting language. In the meantime, you will learn about the most important concept in contemporary financial accounting: accrual accounting. You will then critically analyze how firms recognize revenues. Finally, you will finish the course with an analysis of accounting for short-term assets where you will go into detail on how firms account for accounts receivables and inventories.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Understand main financial statements and the financial information they provide
• Write a financial transaction in financial accounting language and understand how this impacts main financial statements
• Understand how accrual accounting and fundamental accounting concepts work
• Understand revenue recognition principles and how they impact main financial statements
• Account for accounts receivables and inventories.

This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

An overview of the ideas, methods, and institutions that permit human society to manage risks and foster enterprise. Emphasis on financially-savvy leadership skills. Description of practices today and analysis of prospects for the future. Introduction to risk management and behavioral finance principles to understand the real-world functioning of securities, insurance, and banking industries. The ultimate goal of this course is using such industries effectively and towards a better society.

To successfully lead major projects you have to understand typical investor and project financing approaches. In this course, you’ll learn to interpret some key contractual instruments that are relevant for the financing of major engineering projects so that you are in a position to ensure the financially secure delivery of your project. You’ll explore the concept of “time value of money” and be able to compute key indicators such as “Pay-back time”, “Net Present value” and “Internal Rate of Return”.
You’ll identify common stakeholder and management approaches, and be able to implement key messaging, take accurate requirements and manage expectations.

Through real-life case studies, you’ll identify appropriate best practices related to governance, execution strategies, requirements management, procurement, asset and risk management and organisational design and development for the successful delivery of large engineering projects.

This course explores concepts analysed in the University’s Online MSc in Engineering Management. If you are interested to develop your skills further, take a look at our online degree.

Our primary goal is to help you to understand FinTech and to become more confident and persuasive in your ability to analyze and make recommendations to executives within the finance industry regarding how to react to these changes.

This FIRST MOOC ON FINTECH IN ASIA-PACIFIC offered by HKUST presents the insight of several professors from the top business school in Asia as well as perspectives from industry professionals. HKUST has been ranked for many years as the No.1 EMBA program in the world, as the number one Finance program in Asia, and as the top MBA program in Asia by multiple independent rating and review journals and surveys.

This course "FinTech Foundations and Overview" offers the combined strengths of HKUST in Business, Finance, and Technology as one the world's leading academic institutions on an important area of technology and business innovations. For learners from outside Asia, this also gives an insight into changes happening in the most advanced FinTech markets of the world, since Asia leads worldwide in FinTech adoption and creative innovations.

In this course, we will expand our exploration of statistical inference techniques by focusing on the science and art of fitting statistical models to data. We will build on the concepts presented in the Statistical Inference course (Course 2) to emphasize the importance of connecting research questions to our data analysis methods. We will also focus on various modeling objectives, including making inference about relationships between variables and generating predictions for future observations.

This course will introduce and explore various statistical modeling techniques, including linear regression, logistic regression, generalized linear models, hierarchical and mixed effects (or multilevel) models, and Bayesian inference techniques. All techniques will be illustrated using a variety of real data sets, and the course will emphasize different modeling approaches for different types of data sets, depending on the study design underlying the data (referring back to Course 1, Understanding and Visualizing Data with Python).

During these lab-based sessions, learners will work through tutorials focusing on specific case studies to help solidify the week’s statistical concepts, which will include further deep dives into Python libraries including Statsmodels, Pandas, and Seaborn. This course utilizes the Jupyter Notebook environment within Coursera.

How do you implement ideas?

This course provides practical proven tools for transforming an idea into a product or service that creates value for others. As students acquire these tools, they learn how to tell bad ideas from good, how to build a winning strategy, how to shape a unique value proposition, prepare a business plan, compare their innovation to existing solutions, build flexibility into their plan and determine when best to quit.

As a vital part of the course students conduct on-site interviews with entrepreneurs who have launched startups, and are eager to share their valuable insights with them.

Upon completing this course successfully, graduates will be able to:
1. Transform ideas into real products, services and processes, by validating the idea, testing it, and turning it into a growing, profitable and sustainable business.
2. Identify the major steps and requirements in order to estimate the potential of an innovative idea as the basis of an innovative project.
3. Reach creative solutions via an iteration of a virtually endless stream of world-changing ideas and strategies, integrating feedback, and learning from failures along the way.
4. Apply the 10 entrepreneurial tools in creating a business plan for a new innovative venture.
5. Apply methods and strategies learned from interviews with startup entrepreneurs and innovators.
6. Communicate and sell innovative ideas successfully.

Welcome to Fundamentals of Big Data, the fourth course of the Key Technologies of Data Analytics specialization. By enrolling in this course, you are taking the next step in your career in data analytics. This course is the fourth of a series that aims to prepare you for a role working in data analytics. In this course, you will be introduced to many of the core concepts of big data. You will learn about the primary systems used in big data. We’ll go through phases of a common big data life cycle. This course covers a wide variety of topics that are critical for understanding big data and are designed to give you an introduction and overview as you begin to build relevant knowledge and skills.

Organization is a fundamental theme to understand the real functioning of each company or, more in general, of any institution, and it is part of the basic know-how of each manager. Organization design implies decisions on how work is subdivided and how coordination between the various activities and people who autonomously perform them is guaranteed. Moreover, organization design is willing to consider also the interdependences between people daily activities (namely processes): in fact, processes are the real lever to achieve organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Lastly, organization design should also consider how people and units take their decisions, given that organizing and deciding are two central and complementary activities of the managerial function.

To achieve these goals, this course aims at explaining you the main concepts of organization, with a strong practical orientation: illustration of typical organizational problems through real corporate examples will be used. But a solid theoretical background is provided as well: the main theories behind organizational design will be used to dig into the main areas of investigation.

The course investigates three main areas:

the analysis and design of a proper organization, at the micro level (individual) and at the macro level (group of multiple individuals);
the analysis of how to effectively manage processes, in terms of activities, performance and principles;
the analysis of how to rapidly take decisions, in terms of process, constraints, models and game theory approach.

This course takes a deep dive into paid advertising on social media. Learn how to start advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram by developing effective ads. Learn how to work with design teams by capturing the essence of your ad campaign in a creative brief, and understand how privacy policies may affect your ads. Complete the course with a project where you will produce a creative brief with assets you would deliver to a design team for your ad campaign. You’ll also create your first social media ad.

By the end of this course you will be able to:
• Determine why and when to invest in paid advertising on social media
• Understand the anatomy of a social media ad and how they differ from organic posts
• Evaluate on which platforms to run social media ad campaigns and what makes an ad effective
• Craft compelling and effective visuals and copy for social media ads
• Learn how to collaborate effectively with others through creative briefs
• Build foundational understanding for data, data-based advertising and privacy protection
• Build an ad directly from your Facebook Business Page and your Instagram Business Account
• Use Instagram Stories Ads effectively to connect with customers
• Write a creative brief and create a social media ad

This course is intended for people who want to learn how to create and manage ads on social media. Learners don't need marketing experience, but they have basic internet navigation skills and are eager to participate and connect in social media. Having a Facebook or Instagram account helps and ideally learners have already completed course 1 (Introduction to Social Media Marketing) and 2 (Social Media Management) in this program.

By the end of this project, you will be able to generate a user experience onboarding map to visualize the complete entry process that a user has at the start of their relationship with a brand so that an organization can grow longevity by ensuring that they get off on the right foot with users.

To do this you will gain hands-on experience exercising empathy to accurately document brand touchpoint, pain points, and gain points across the onboarding journey in the Miro online visual collaboration platform for teamwork.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

By the end of this project, you will be able to design and visualize an end-to-end user experience.

To do this you will gain hands-on experience exercising empathy to accurately document the stages, actions, emotions, and thoughts of the user while assessing opportunities and overall qualities of the customer experience in the Miro online visual collaboration platform for teamwork.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

In this 2-hour long project-based course, you will learn the basics of using Power BI Desktop software. We will do this by analyzing data on credit card defaults with Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop is a free Business Intelligence application from Microsoft that lets you load, transform, and visualize data. You can create interactive reports and dashboards quite easily, and quickly. We will learn some of the basics of Power BI by importing, transforming, and visualizing the data.

This course is aimed at learners who are looking to get started with the Power BI Desktop software. There are no hard prerequisites and any competent computer user should be able to complete the project successfully.

Note: This course works best for learners who are based in the North America region. We’re currently working on providing the same experience in other regions.

This course teaches you the simple principles expert managers use to improve and motivate employee performance. You’ll never have to avoid telling an employee “the truth” again, because the seven techniques we teach will not make employees defensive or afraid. As a manager, or someone who would like to be a manager, you’ll also learn specifically what feedback is, how negative feedback is weighed more heavily than positive, and how positive feedback can super-charge behaviors such as creativity and teamwork.

Giving feedback is a skill which develops over time. We give you a process you can use to improve your feedback skills and deliver it with confidence. You will find that there is a scientific basis for many of your observations and intuitions about feedback—such as, it is hard to give correctly, people don’t like it, and more. This will be reassuring as you learn how to overcome these difficulties. We hope you have a fantastic time becoming a better manager!

With this course you will position your own leadership style and grow your resilience

In this course, second course of the "Inspirational Leadership" Specialization, you will discover the characteristics of charismatic leadership.
You’ll personally learn how to embody these traits through the “Savoir-Relier” (art of connecting and leading with sense) methodology, which covers 3Gs: being Genuine, Generous, and Generative.
You will then choose which style of leadership best fits you, why and when so you can adapt to more complex and difficult situations with resilience.
In a “Self-Portrait” and “Conversation” with your classmates, you will be able to adjust your own ideas about your leadership styles and strengths, allowing you to increase your self-awareness, improve your relational intelligence, and prepare you to confront crises and resolve conflicts.
You will also be better prepared to face difficult situations and make better decisions by relying on both your perception and analytical skills. All these skills will help you create sense in your team so you can lead it better.

This course is part of a Specialization on Leadership called “Inspirational Leadership: Leading with Sense”, so you may want to take the course “Building Your Leadership Skills” prior of taking this course.
As where in course 1 “Building Your Leadership Skills” you have mostly worked on your inner-self and on the relation between you and the other, in this course you’ll work on the relationship between you and the group, improving your leadership skills when interacting in a team.

Leaders from different organizations and participants of the HEC Paris Leadership Certificate, the program from which this course and specialization is inspired, will share with you their insights about what it takes to become a great leader in a group or team and what they are able to achieve now that they apply The Savoir-Relier methodology.

This course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and taught by top-ranked faculty, focuses on challenges faced by existing private businesses when they attempt to grow substantially.

This free online course is one of 10 courses available in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women collection, designed for entrepreneurs ready to take their business to the next level.

In this course you will gain the skills that will help you to plan how to best grow your business in future. You will learn how to identify business opportunities, and select the one which is the most progressive and forward-looking, assessing its feasibility.

You will also be introduced to the Business Growth Plan (BGP), a strategic tool that will help you identify your business objectives and guide your business’s growth. If you choose to take all 10 free online courses, the BGP will be your key takeaway from Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women.

The 10,000 Women course collection offers a truly flexible online learning experience. You have the freedom to approach the program in any way that works for you – take any course, or combination of courses, to tailor your learning journey to your individual business growth needs. If you choose to take all 10 courses, you will explore all the key elements of your business and develop a thorough plan for your business’s growth.
Find out more about the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women collection in the FAQs.

Are leaders born or made? Learn the essential skills to develop and expand your leadership repertoire, design teams for collaboration, and craft win-win negotiation strategies. High Performance Collaboration: Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation focuses on leadership, teamwork, and negotiation. Students will engage in self-assessments to analyze their leadership style, develop team charters to optimize their groups, and develop a game plan for effective negotiation.

Recurring course sessions repeat every 2 weeks on Monday with an enrollment period of 5 days.