Business Skills   

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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/.

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..

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.

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/.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A blank canvas is full of possibility. If you have an idea for a user experience, how do you turn it into a beautiful and effective user interface? This covers covers principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn concrete strategies to create user interfaces, including key lessons in typography, information architecture, layout, color, and more. You’ll learn particular issues that arise in new device contexts, such as mobile and responsive interfaces. You will learn how to apply these design principles in a modern context of increasingly diverse form factors - from tablets, to walls, to watches.

Just how familiar are you with a marketing communication campaign? Learn more about this key pillar in the marketing mix and use it to give the push your product or service needs.

Through this course you will understand the most important issues when planning and evaluating marketing communications strategies and executions. You'll be able to combine the appropriate theories and models with practical information to make better marketing communications decisions. After completing this course you'll be able to use integrated marketing communications (IMC) in the process of creating valuable brands and winning your consumers.

IE Business School professor Eda Sayin will guide you through the process with the help of expert interviews from international marketing firms and will provide interesting real-life examples. After this course you will be equipped with the knowledge to ensure that you make the correct decision when it comes to communications and the placement of advertising and digital marketing.

This course gives you a reliable model for preparing and delivering effective presentations.

In business, in school, and in public life, we are often called upon to “make a few comments.” Often, people tasked with such speeches become flummoxed. They might not know what to talk about, or ramble without making a point, or simply be confusing to listen to. This course is designed to help you shine where others falter.

We’ll learn how organize talks clearly, write them memorably, and deliver them confidently. By the end of the course, you should be able to significantly reduce your fear of public speaking, use rehearsal techniques to develop a strong, vibrant speaking voice, and perform speeches with dynamic movement and gestures. The speech model that we’ll practice is useful for briefings, elevator talks, interviews, and even as a structure for hour-long presentations.

If you’re a beginner, this course will help you quickly master the fundamentals of speaking. If you’re a seasoned speaker, this course will help you better understand public speaking and push you to the next level.

This course lays the foundation of social media marketing. You’ll learn what social media marketing entails, including the history and the different social media channels that exist. You’ll learn how to select a social media channel that fits your needs, set goals and success metrics, and determine who your target audience is.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:
• Understand the landscape of traditional, digital, and social media marketing
• Understand how to become certified as a Digital Marketing Associate
• Understand the major social media platforms, how they function, and what role they play in marketing
• Create SMART goals and identify KPIs
• Define your target audience and their customer journey
• Choose the right social media platforms and learn how to create social media policies

Whatever level of knowledge you start with, this course will help you build a solid foundation for social media marketing and gain applicable skills that will allow you to make your social media marketing efforts more successful and noticeable.

Learners don't need marketing experience, but should have basic internet navigation skills and be eager to participate and connect in social media. Learners must have a Facebook account and an Instagram account helps.

Implement and manage a successful financing program for a corporate buying organization by learning about the key success factors in Supply Chain Finance. In this course, you'll learn about the challenges and bottlenecks in Supply Chain Finance and understand their impact on Supply Chain Finance programs. This course will help you understand who the ideal customer is for a Supply Chain Finance program and understand how revenue is generated and such programs are priced. You'll learn about the relevant factors for suppliers to come onboard and trade as well as identify the key roles and responsibilities involved in Supply Chain Finance.

Additionally, this course will explain how to develop metrics and list the necessary elements for developing an effective financing program. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to perform a pre-sales analysis and a detailed supplier analysis, which are crucial for setting up a Supply Chain Finance program.

The digital age is dramatically reshaping the rules for organizational success. The new context demands renewal of your capabilities and development of different mindsets. In this course, you’ll learn the different components of emotional intelligence at work. For example, you’ll learn how you can work effectively in teams, build cooperative relationships with your key stakeholders, exercise effective influence, handle difficult conversations, and create energy and enthusiasm to foster meaningful change. Our modules will begin with powerful stories that are illustrative of typical challenges faced by front-line leaders. We’ll analyze the case illustration using the ideas from emotional intelligence theory, and highlight the key lessons that you should take away in terms of mindsets and skills that you should master to distinguish yourself as a leader.

Do you dream of being a CMIO or a Senior Director of Clinical Informatics? If you are aiming to rise up in the ranks in your health system or looking to pivot your career in the direction of big data and health IT, this course is made for you. You'll hear from experts at Johns Hopkins about their experiences harnessing the power of big data in healthcare, improving EHR adoption, and separating out the hope vs hype when it comes to digital medicine.

Whether you're a nurse, pharmacist, physician, other allied health professional or come from a non-clinical background--you know that Health Informatics skills are in demand. This newly launched 5-course specialization by JohnsHopkins faculty members provides a solid foundation for anyone wanting to become a leader in one of the hottest fields in healthcare.

As health informaticians, we need to be very clear in our understanding of the current state (as-is), the future state (to-be) and any unintended consequences that can result from our interventions. Prior to introducing large scale change, we need to assess whether a healthcare organization is truly ready for change. This involves taking into account an organization's current culture and values. Successfully leading change through health informatics also requires strategic planning and careful financial considerations. Proper workflow redesign and a clear change management strategy are of utmost importance when introducing new technologies and in ensuring their successful adoption and proper use. 

By the end of this course, students will become familiar with examples of successful and failed attempts at change in health informatics, and the reasons for each. Students will be armed with tools to help optimize their chances for successfully leading change in their respective organizations. 

This course focuses on a range of management techniques. You’ll discover the main skills and competencies of effective leaders, and how to distinguish between management and leadership. The course will cover team dynamics, how to build effective relationships, key motivation theories, and how to use communication to best effect.

This course forms part of a specialisation from the University of London designed to help you develop and build the essential business, academic, and cultural skills necessary to succeed in international business, or in further study.

If completed successfully, your certificate from this specialisation can also be used as part of the application process for the University of London Global MBA programme, particularly for early career applicants. If you would like more information about the Global MBA, please visit https://mba.london.ac.uk/.

This course is endorsed by CMI

In this course, you will learn about why and how supply chains become susceptible to a disruption. We will examine this by discussing supply side and demand side issues, primary supply chain flows, complexity, risk management and a combination of solid theoretical supply chain perspectives and current real-world stories. You will learn about the structural, relational and operational factors that come into play during a supply chain disruption and the mechanisms for the effective management of these factors. Your understanding will be enhanced through examples from manufacturing and health contexts, and the PPE supply chain disruption during COVID-19.

Organizations large and small are inundated with data about consumer choices. But that wealth of information does not always translate into better decisions. Knowing how to interpret data is the challenge -- and marketers in particular are increasingly expected to use analytics to inform and justify their decisions.

Marketing analytics enables marketers to measure, manage and analyze marketing performance to maximize its effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI). Beyond the obvious sales and lead generation applications, marketing analytics can offer profound insights into customer preferences and trends, which can be further utilized for future marketing and business decisions.

This course, developed at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, gives you the tools to measure brand and customer assets, understand regression analysis, and design experiments as a way to evaluate and optimize marketing campaigns. You'll leave the course with a solid understanding of how to use marketing analytics to predict outcomes and systematically allocate resources.

You can follow my posts in Twitter, @rajkumarvenk, and on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/education-marketing.

Thanks,
Raj
Professor of Business Administration at Darden

This course examines how new digital tools, such as the Internet, smartphones, and 3D printing, are revolutionizing the world of marketing by changing the roles and practices of both firms and consumers. Marketing in a Digital World is one of the most popular courses on Coursera with over 500,000 learners and is rated by Class Central as one of the Top 50 MOOCs of All Time (https://www.class-central.com/report/top-moocs/).

You will be able to:
• Understand how digital tools are changing the nature of marketing
• Explain how digital tools allow consumers to take a more active role in product development, promotion, placement, and pricing activities
• Obtain a new set of concepts, tools, and stories to enhance your digital marketing efforts
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/.

We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it? Models. Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don't. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one. Why do models make us better thinkers? Models help us to better organize information - to make sense of that fire hose or hairball of data (choose your metaphor) available on the Internet. Models improve our abilities to make accurate forecasts. They help us make better decisions and adopt more effective strategies. They even can improve our ability to design institutions and procedures. In this class, I present a starter kit of models: I start with models of tipping points. I move on to cover models explain the wisdom of crowds, models that show why some countries are rich and some are poor, and models that help unpack the strategic decisions of firm and politicians.

The models covered in this class provide a foundation for future social science classes, whether they be in economics, political science, business, or sociology. Mastering this material will give you a huge leg up in advanced courses. They also help you in life. Here's how the course will work. For each model, I present a short, easily digestible overview lecture. Then, I'll dig deeper. I'll go into the technical details of the model. Those technical lectures won't require calculus but be prepared for some algebra. For all the lectures, I'll offer some questions and we'll have quizzes and even a final exam. If you decide to do the deep dive, and take all the quizzes and the exam, you'll receive a Course Certificate. If you just decide to follow along for the introductory lectures to gain some exposure that's fine too. It's all free. And it's all here to help make you a better thinker!

After a warm Welcome to the Global Procurement and Sourcing Specialization, I will provide a brief introduction to the specialization and its courses covering the following:
-Instructor Biography
-Who should take this course
-Flow of the course

Following the introduction, the student will get the opportunity to learn about some of the current challenges facing procurement and sourcing professionals today through reading ten current articles ranging from what is procurement to how to collaborate with suppliers. These articles/knowledge will be a foundation for later courses on how to use tools, processes and improve skills to address many of these opportunities. There will be a brief assessment (true/false) of your knowledge gained from these articles.

This Course includes basic information on procurement, Importance of the procurement organization and its’ role in the organization, cost vs. value, processes such as the use of RFQ, RFP, RFX, Differences between direct and indirect procurement, and Stakeholder management

The course will supported by videos, readings and a required case that will be assessed by a peer review.

In addition, a Practice Assessment (multiple choice) is available to the student. This should be helpful as there is a Final Assessment (40 Multiple Choice) at the end of the specialization in Course 7 that is required to obtain the certification.

The main purpose of this course is to focus on good questions and how to answer them. This is essential to making considered decisions as a leader in any organization or in your life overall. Topics will include the basis of human curiosity, development of questions, connections between questions and approaches to information gathering design , variable measurement, sampling, the differences between experimental and non-experimental designs, data analysis, reporting and the ethics of inquiry projects. Emphasis will be placed on approaches used in the social sciences (i.e., sociology, psychology, anthropology), but we will also discuss how others (i.e., natural scientists, business analysts) might approach the inquiry process. No prior knowledge of statistics is required for this course.

Market Research is a growing and important field that is used in many industries around the world. Given all the data that is collected whether by organizations, industries, social media, governments, etc., it’s important that someone can review and sift through all the noise to provide valuable insights. And that’s where you come in as a market researcher. This course will only scratch the surface and provide you a foundational understanding of this field.

In this course, you will be able to define market research and identify some tools used in the industry. You will be able to discuss the importance of secondary and internal research in terms of the planning process. You will be able to define what primary research is and identify the various ways to conduct primary research. You will be able to focus on an actual research plan or proposal for your peer review project. You will be able to compose a response to a request for a proposal or research plan and be able to address the various components of the proposal and package it in a professional manner.

In Course 3 of the Art of Sales Specialization, you will learn how to give great presentations with dashing style and self-confidence. You will also learn how to ask the looming closing question. Finally, you will learn how to develop your brand and go above and beyond for your clients.

Welcome to the Inbound Certification course!

This course will introduce you to inbound and provide you with a big picture view of everything you need for a successful inbound strategy.

So, why inbound?

Inbound is a fundamental shift in the way you do business. Instead of an interruption-based message where the marketer or salesperson had all the control, inbound is about empowering potential customers. Consumer’s buying behaviors have changed and will continue to change. That's the driving force behind inbound. What your customers want today is different than what they wanted 10 years ago. That means you need to change the way you market, sell, and service to match the way people actually want to shop and buy.

So, wondering what to expect in this course?

After an initial lesson on an introduction to the inbound fundamentals, the course consists of a set of lessons that follows the inbound methodology. The inbound methodology illustrates the four stages that make an inbound business. It reflects the entire inbound marketing, sales, services, and relationship process. The stages are Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight.

Each lesson includes different tactics that you can apply to help you and your business grow better. You’ll also hear from HubSpot executives and leadership including: HubSpot’s Co-founders Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah. Chief People Officer, Katie Burke. VP of HubSpot Academy, Mark Kilens. VP of Marketing, Meghan Anderson. SVP of Product, Christopher O’Donnell. VP of Sales, Michelle Benfer. And VP of Customer Success, Alison Elworthy

An ambitious vision for the future of your organisation isn’t enough – how do you communicate this vision to get your colleagues on board? The ability to effectively communicate and persuade others is a key leadership skill. Traditional and common-sense models of communication and persuasion often fail to capture the complex nature of ‘influencing’. Via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments) this course will develop your capacity to communicate appropriately in different situational and cultural contexts, making you a highly influential leader.

Innovation strategy is about creating unique value for consumers by delivering a great product that satisfies their needs.

At the core of a successful innovation strategy is a great product concept. Product is an all-encompassing term that includes physical goods, intangible services, and even ideas. There are three pillars to a successful product strategy: a clear understanding of (a) the target customers (WHO), (b) the specific elements of the product offering (WHAT) that satisfies consumer needs and dovetails with company capabilities, and (c) the tactical plans to reach end consumers (HOW). The value proposition has to be embedded in a coherent business model in order to create and capture value. But well-laid innovation plans can go awry without a consideration of the business ecosystem that includes competitors and collaborators, including suppliers, distributors, and retailers, or the contextual environment in which the company operates. In an interdependent world, fostering an integrated ecosystem is critically important for companies interested in maximizing the odds of innovation success.

You will be able to:

- Understand key ideas about innovation and product strategy
- Strategize for value capture in a business model
- Critically examine the roles of various players in a business ecosystem

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/.

This course will cover Supplier Selection and Evaluation, Contract Management, Quality & Risk Management, and Ethics.

One of the important decisions that a Procurement professional makes is selecting the right supplier.We will cover how to evaluate suppliers, using a very simple evaluation tool, to select the right suppliers. In contract management we will expose you to six different types of contracts that a procurement professional can consider for the contract. We will highlight 10 risk management strategies that will mitigate risks for your firm. Lastly, we will cover the very important topic of procurement ethics-what to do and not to do in ethically dealing with suppliers.

In addition to the videos, there are reading materials, and two cases to support your learnings. Both cases will be assessed via a Peer Group.

Welcome to Supply Chain Analytics - an exciting area that is in high demand!

In this introductory course to Supply Chain Analytics, I will take you on a journey to this fascinating area where supply chain management meets data analytics. You will learn real life examples on how analytics can be applied to various domains of a supply chain, from selling, to logistics, production and sourcing, to generate a significant social / economic impact. You will also learn job market trend, job requirement and preparation. Lastly, you will master a job intelligence tool to find preferred job(s) by region, industry and company.

Upon completing this course, you will

1. Understand why analytics is critical to supply chain management and its financial / economic impact.
2. See the pain points of a supply chain and how analytics may relieve them.
3. Learn supply chain analytics job opportunities, and use a job intelligence tool to make data-driven career decisions.

I hope you enjoy the course!

Have you ever wondered how goods get delivered to us so quickly as soon as we order them? One word: Logistics! In this introductory Supply Chain Logistics course, I will take you on a journey to this fascinating backbone of global trade. We cover the three major building blocks of logistics networks: transportation, warehousing, and inventory. After completing this course, you will be able to differentiate the advantages and disadvantages of different modes of transportation. You will understand what goes into designing and setting up a warehousing facility. Finally, you will be able to select the options that enable you to develop logistics networks, that minimize costs and deliver top customer service. This is an introductory course designed to provide you with a start on your learning journey in logistics. You do not need to have any background in logistics, but it would be beneficial if you had a basic understanding of business concepts. Join me and we will learn together about logistics!

Interested in learning advanced supply chain topics? Check out the Supply Chain Excellence MasterTrack™ Certificate: https://www.coursera.org/mastertrack/supply-chain-excellence-rutgers

As a human being, we all consume products and/or services all the time. This morning you got up and ate your breakfast, e.g., eggs, milk, bread, fresh fruits, and the like. After the breakfast, you drove your car to work or school. At your office, you used your computer, perhaps equipped with 27” LCD monitor. During your break, you drank a cup of coffee and played with your iPhone. So on and so forth. You probably take it for granted that you can enjoy all of these products. But if you take a closer look at how each of these products can be made and eventually delivered to you, you will realize that each one of these is no short of miracle. For example, which fruit do you like? Consider fresh strawberries. In order for the strawberries to be on your breakfast table, there must be numerous functions, activities, transactions, and people involved in planting, cultivating, delivering, and consuming strawberries. Moreover, all of these functions, activities, transactions, and people are connected as an integral chain, through which physical products like strawberries themselves and virtual elements such as information and communication flow back and forth constantly. By grouping related functions or activities, we have a supply chain, comprised of four primary functions such as supplier, manufacturer, distributor, and finally consumer. A supply chain is essentially a value chain.

For the society or economy as a whole, the goal is to maximize value, i.e., to create satisfactory value without spending too much. In order to create the maximum value for the strawberry supply chain, every participant in the chain must carry out its function efficiently. In addition, all of the members must coordinate with each other effectively in order to ensure value maximization. We have to face the same issues for almost all the products and services we take for granted in our everyday life, e.g., cars, hamburgers, haircuts, surgeries, movies, banks, restaurants, and you name it!

In this course, we want to understand fundamental principles of value creation for the consumers or the market. We try to answer questions like how the product or service is made, how the value-creating activities or functions are coordinated, who should play what leadership roles in realizing all these, and so on. As our course title hints, we approach all of these issues from a learning perspective, which is dynamic in nature and emphasizes long-term capability building rather than short-term symptomatic problem solving.

Businesses and their supply chains are facing increasing competition and uncertainty in what is now a truly globalised trade environment. To remain competitive, organisations need to think globally – ensuring supply chains meet customer demands while minimising costs and maximising responsiveness. From a strategic perspective, this involves making important trade-off decisions between cost, quality and flexibility of supply chains. Via structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts and written assessments) this course will equip you with the future-focused capabilities needed to design and manage effective, sustainable and efficient global supply chains of tomorrow.

This course will provide a solid understanding of what a supply chain is all about. The course:
- Provides an introduction to Supply Chain
- Leverages graphics to promote the Integrated Supply Chain model
- Emphasizes understanding the Extended Supply Chain
- Presents a holistic approach – Incorporating People, Process, and Technology
- Calls-out industry-specific supply chain
- Leverages discussions, videos, quizzes, and questions for consideration
- Provides awareness of career path opportunities
- Presents emerging and futuristic trends in supply chain
and given that at GT we are focused on developing what’s next in the world, we include Discussion of emerging and futuristic trends in supply chain. There is very little math involved in this course – so don’t worry at all about your math skills.

The course incorporates reading materials that were developed as part of a $24.5M TAACCCT grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration to the LINCS in Supply Chain Management consortium.

This course provides an introduction to the U.S. federal income taxation of corporations and their shareholders. The course focuses on the relevant provisions of Subchapter C of the Internal Revenue Code, as well as related Treasury Regulations and judicial opinions, governing corporate formation, operations, distributions, and liquidation. Practical in-class study problems facilitate self-discovery of technical tax knowledge along with the development of a variety of professional skills and attitudes.

Discover the future of payment technology, from mobile payments to tokenization.

In this course, you will learn new ways of making payments from consumer-to-business (C2B), from consumer-to-consumer (C2C), and from business-to-business (B2B).

You will explore current payment system technologies to examine their strengths and weaknesses, and understand the ways technological innovation is changing these traditional systems.

You’ll learn about new front-end innovations like digital wallets and mobile payments and also discover back-end innovations like tokenization, mobile money, and new payment infrastructure.

In this course, you will learn what the main financial markets and their characteristics are as well as how they are linked to the economy.

Our very diversified team of experts will start by teaching you how the price of stocks and bonds are computed and why they move while you will become increasingly aware of the notion of risk and why it matters when measuring an investment's performance. The focus will then move to less popular markets such as gold, emerging markets, real estate, hedge funds and private markets. These will be analyzed with an emphasis on their particular risks and return opportunities as well as how they can help in building efficient portfolios. Finally, the policies of central banks and their impact on financial markets will be presented to you along with the link between the economy and the price of financial assets.

All along these different steps, experts from UBS, our corporate partner, will show you how the concepts you just acquired are effectively applied in a leading global bank. This focus on practicality means you will not only understand what is going on in global financial markets but also start to figure out how you can use them to achieve financial goals, be it a client's or your own.

Course Director and main teaching contributor: Dr. Michel Girardin, Lecturer in Macro-Finance, University of Geneva

This course is designed to provide a basic understanding of financial statements with an emphasis on the balance sheet. However, to understand accounting driven financial statements, it is important to recognize that accounting is less about counting and more about measuring. “What is it that is being measured?” Well, as the course unfolds, you will learn about the three measurement questions and how the balance sheet helps to answer the first two of these questions. By touring a real company and interviewing real business people, the course describes the basic content of financial statements in a simple yet relevant context. The goal of the course is to leave a lasting impression about what balance sheet consists of and what it reveals. The next course in the Fundamentals of Accounting Specialization completes the conversation by addressing the remaining measurement question.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
• Describe the purpose of a balance sheet.
• Define the three components of a balance sheet.
• Recognize and understand the meaning of several items typically presented on a balance sheet.
• Explain the broader purpose of financial statements and the role of accounting in producing the financial statements.
• Read and, to some extent, interpret real-world balance sheets.

What makes for a great user experience? How can you consistently design experiences that work well, are easy to use and people want to use? This course will teach you the core process of experience design and how to effectively evaluate your work with the people for whom you are designing. You'll learn fundamental methods of design research that will enable you to effectively understand people, the sequences of their actions, and the context in which they work. Through the assignments, you’ll learn practical techniques for making sense of what you see and transform your observations into meaningful actionable insights and unique opportunity areas for design. You’ll also explore how to generate ideas in response to the opportunities identified and learn methods for making your ideas tangible. By answering specific questions and refining your concepts, you’ll move closer to making your ideas real. We’ll use cases from a variety of industries including health, education, transportation, finance, and beyond to illustrate how these methods work across different domains.

Good luck and we hope you enjoy the course!

This course is focused on the early user experience (UX) challenges of research, planning, setting goals, understanding the user, structuring content, and developing interactive sequences. While the concepts covered will translate to many kinds of interactive media (apps, digital kiosks, games), our primary focus will be on designing contemporary, responsive websites. In this course you will complete the first half of a large scale project—developing a comprehensive plan for a complex website—by defining the strategy and scope of the site, as well as developing its information architecture and overall structure. Along the way we will also discuss:

- Different job descriptions in the web design industry and where UX and UI skills fall within this spectrum
- The difference between native apps and websites
- The difference of agile vs. waterfall approaches
- User personas and site personas
- User testing

The work and knowledge in this course continues in the last course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, Web Design: Wireframes to Prototypes, where you will tackle—finally—wireframes, visual mockups, and clickable prototypes.
This is the third course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, which brings a design-centric approach to user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, and offers practical, skill-based instruction centered around a visual communications perspective, rather than on one focused on marketing or programming alone.

These courses are ideal for anyone with some experience in graphic or visual design and who would like to build their skill set in UI or UX for app and web design. It would also be ideal for anyone with experience in front- or back-end web development or human-computer interaction and want to sharpen their visual design and analysis skills for UI or UX.