MBA Program Handbook

Foreword

This manual has been designed to familiarize you with the policies and procedures that shape the Woolf MBA Program. This manual should not be viewed as complete and is not designed to replace the Woolf Academic Handbook. It is intended to provide information you will need in order to make decisions about your graduate studies and to acquaint you with the administrative requirements, policies and procedures you will be expected to meet that are outside the scope of the Woolf Academic Handbook. This document should thus be used in tandem with the Woolf Academic handbook. Where either manual seems incomplete, you are encouraged to inquire with your Faculty Advisor. For questions beyond the domain of your Advisor you are encouraged to reach out to help@woolf.university.

We hope that your experience within Woolf’s program will be fulfilling, stimulating, and engaging. We are excited to welcome you to the Woolf community.

The Mission of Woolf

Woolf exists to promote academic excellence, broaden access to higher education, and guard values that are humane, democratic, and international. Above all, Woolf values freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression.

We do this through our commitment to high-quality education and through widening the horizon of opportunity by connecting students with quality academics across the world.

Through Woolf’s world-class platform and programs students gain exposure to new ideas, new ways of understanding, and new ways of learning. By uniting exceptional faculty with motivated students, Woolf is able to build an outstanding academic community leading to journeys of intellectual transformation. From this we hope that students will share their academic, intellectual and other talents in serving their communities across the world.

Woolf is guided by the following tenets:

Background. Talent may be evenly distributed but opportunity is not – we are working to widen the horizon of opportunity by connecting students and teachers across the world.

Education. Woolf prioritizes an education that will serve its students both in the near-term and in the long-term. Woolf seeks to provide a personalized, bespoke education. In all fields, Woolf seeks to instill values of curiosity, intellectual discipline, and clarity of expression.

Research. Woolf prioritizes research-driven teaching that uses the latest academic scholarship, and Woolf encourages its students to engage in groundbreaking research.

Society. Woolf encourages partnerships with governments, educational institutions, research centers, schools, and businesses of all kinds – provided these partnerships do not infringe on the values of Woolf.

Technology. To the extent that existing or new technologies can improve the educational outcomes for students, widen access to the Woolf global network, improve the career experience of academics, better secure credible governance, lower the costs of institutional management, and generally support the mission of Woolf – these are embraced.

In all things, Woolf values excellence and measures itself against the highest international standards. Woolf seeks to raise those standards further.

Academic Program Information

Program Description

The Masters in Business Administration (MBA) is a 45-credit program that includes 14 online courses. Students may choose to receive a general MBA or may specialize in one of the following areas: Data Analytics, Marketing, Finance, International Business, Executive Leadership, Product Management, Technology Leadership, Occupational Health and Safety. The program is an integrated, sequential course of study in which students obtain and demonstrate the knowledge and skills required to be business leaders. The program is broken down into three segments: short courses, long courses, and a capstone project - the Digital Action Program for Business Administration.

The MBA program is structured to include coursework which teaches students comprehensive and specialized subjects in business administration, with an emphasis on skills in critical thinking and strategic planning for changing and fast-paced environments. Graduates will leave the program with a deep understanding of financial and operational analysis and core competencies in decision making and communication techniques to interface and lead across a variety of business landscapes.

The curriculum emphasizes problem-solving skills, critical thinking and data-based decision making through analytics, computational methods, and modeling. Our graduates are prepared to lead through advanced knowledge in management techniques, execution of organizational strategy in both financial and non-financial objectives, and through formulating research-based solutions methodology in practical problems in incomplete environments.

Courses include instruction targeting the areas above as well as and other relevant learning goals, opportunities for repeated practice, and methods for students to demonstrate their accomplishment of the outcomes. Students demonstrate their competence by completing a culminating project capstone, in which students are grouped into cohorts and must work together on a real business problem.

The MBA is delivered completely digitally by combining asynchronous components (lecture videos, readings, and written assignments) and synchronous cohort meetings attended by students and an instructor or faculty member during a video call.

The asynchronous components support the schedules of students from diverse work-life situations, and synchronous meetings provide accountability, motivation, and a sense of community presence for students. The synchronous sessions allow unparalleled access to high quality instruction and enhanced collaboration among students through using face-to-face online interaction.

Faculty conduct live office hours with students and interaction between faculty members and students, both individually and as a group, is enhanced in the online environment by blending asynchronous content with real-time student responses. Faculty and enrolled students have 24/7/365 access to technical support through Woolf’s support system.

Woolf’s digital campus allows students to complete the program in as little as 50 weeks of continuous study or within 5 years as part of a part-time course of study. The degree on the students’ transcripts is a Master’s in Business Administration, which attests to their completion of the requirements.

Admission Requirements

The Woolf MBA is a fast-paced, rigorous degree focused on teaching comprehensive and specialized subjects in business administration. Candidates should have a bachelor's degree and at least 3 years of post-graduation experience, including management or supervisory experience, or have at least 7 years of executive business management experience with at least some undergraduate level courses or an associate’s.

English language competency at an IELTS 6.5 or equivalent is required of all applicants.

The program is suited for executives and general business managers in organizations of all sizes and types, or for those who will soon move into such management positions. It is designed for those that will have responsibility for planning, organizing, and directing business operations.

In all cases, the target group should be prepared to pursue substantial academic studies.

Curriculum Areas

The program is organized into a course structure of three tiered areas. Each tiered area sequentially builds off of the previous, so students must complete each tier before advancing to the next.

Each course consists of regular lessons and cumulative lessons devoted to cumulative examination. Each course requires about 75 hours to complete (see individual courses for details). A full-time student completes two lessons per week with an assignment submitted for each lesson; this pattern continues for each regular lesson in the class.

Summative examination lessons allow an appropriate amount of time for students to review and revise their prior work and deepen their synthetic grasp of the materials in preparation for cumulative examination or project.

The degree has a capstone project consisting of the Digital Action Program, in which students are grouped into cohorts and must work together on a real business problem. The capstone represents a synthesis of knowledge and skills gained throughout the graduate program. Over the course of the capstone, students use multidisciplinary approaches to perform critical analyses of real business issues in situations of uncertainty and incomplete information and develop an actionable solution, which is presented and assessed at the end of the capstone.

Short Course Foundational Learning (15 Credits): 10 short courses which provide fundamental business knowledge and understanding, including areas like creative innovation, business finance and economics, strategic thinking and business leadership and strategy.

Long Speciality Courses (15 Credits): 3 advanced long courses focused on methods and strategies for an advanced understanding of iterative product development, customer engagement and defining “product/market fit.”

Digital Internships and Case Studies (15 Credits): The Digital Action Program culminating feature that provides students with hands-on learning in a real-world business consultancy engagement and a focus on applying what they have learned earlier on in the program for real-world application among leading business professionals.

Learning Outcomes

 The program teaches students comprehensive and specialized subjects in business administration; it develops skills in critical thinking and strategic planning for changing and fast-paced environments, including financial and operational analysis; and it develops competences in leadership, including autonomous decision-making, and communication with employees, stakeholders, and other members of a business.

Knowledge

• Students will have a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of organizational structures, management techniques, business models, and methods of market entry, and improving product metrics
• Students will gain specialized knowledge, including knowledge which is at the forefront of the field related to the above
• Students will be able to analyze the societal, regulatory, and political contexts in which business gets done from a local and global perspective.
• Students will be able to formulate and execute on organizational strategy to achieve financial and non-financial objectives.
• Students will be able to apply marketing methods used by businesses to create value for shareholders and selected customers and consumers.
• Students will display original thinking on the basis of the knowledge they gain in the course

Skills

• Develop advanced, innovative, and multi-disciplinary problem-solving skills
• Communicate business plans clearly and unambiguously to specialized and non-specialised audiences
• Develop advanced abilities related to operational procedures and implement them in response to changing environments
• Critically evaluate alternative approaches through analytics, computational methods, and modeling on the basis of academic scholarship and case studies, demonstrating reflection on social and ethical responsibilities
• Formulate business judgments and plans despite incomplete information by integrating knowledge and approaches from diverse domains including anthropology, ethnography, and sociology.
• Inquire critically into the theoretical strategies for executing a business plan
• Develop new skills in response to emerging knowledge and techniques and demonstrate leadership skills and innovation in complex and unpredictable contexts

Competences

• Formulate research-based solutions to practical problems in environments of incomplete information
• Manage decisions with autonomy in complex and unpredictable environments
• Organize projects and people in a way that is responsive to changes in the wider business environment
• Demonstrate learning skills needed to maintain continued, self-directed study

Faculty

All instruction is provided by competent academics with qualifications commensurate to their role. All teachers are also expected to have relevant teaching experience in the domain of their expertise. All faculty members at Woolf are expected to be in possession of a research doctorate in the domain of their teaching or supervision; moreover, they are expected to have a record of research or a research agenda reflecting the capacity for research.

Woolf uses clear, fair, and transparent processes for teaching recruitment, conditions of employment, and professional advancement. Notices of availability are publicly listed on the Woolf platform and, when available, other sites visited by academics. Criteria for teaching positions, including any associated conditions of ongoing employment, are clearly stated. Applications for teaching are reviewed by the Administrative Board, or a committee of the Board, until a position(s) is filled. Notices state the supporting documentation required as evidence for the review of an applicant. All applicants are required to demonstrate their competence for the teaching position by providing a copy of their credentials to be verified before the position is filled. This policy applies to all teaching roles of Woolf Education Ltd, including any teaching services provided by third party vendors, which are subject to the same process of review. In all cases, the final decision for filling a role in accordance with the criteria stated on the public notice is made by the Administrative Board.

Woolf’s policies and procedures apply consistently to full-time, part-time, ad hoc, and third-party teaching activities. All teaching activities fall within the scope of Woolf policy. Teaching staff, including part-time or ad hoc teaching staff are directed towards updates and developments in their field as well as the methodological requirements for their programs.

All Faculty Members are encouraged to discuss innovative forms of teaching, formulate how these may be implemented, and propose those implementations in the Faculty Council. At the end of all courses, students provide feedback on their learning experience, and twice per year faculty provide feedback by survey. All teachers are expected to maintain a record of student outcomes, and teaching activities are periodically reviewed or observed. In cases of disagreement, or suspected misconduct, fraud, or prejudice, a Red Flag should be submitted under the Red Flag Procedure.

All courses and programs are subject to processes of quality enhancement to improve student outcomes, including the course’s continued review to assess its scholastic rigor and value.

Faculty Requirements

Academic Staff are called Faculty members at Woolf. Faculty members at Woolf must possess a research doctorate and are expected to have a record of peer-reviewed research. All teaching is under the authority and oversight of a faculty member – including instructional design, synchronous meetings, and lectures. In cases where pre-recorded lectures or podcasts are provided that contain content from outside of Woolf, any such content is to be produced by lecturers who are experts with a research doctorate in the relevant domain, or where relevant, by those with at least 7 years of industry-specific experience.

Teaching Staff are called Expert Instructors, Domain Experts, or simply Instructors. Expert instructors are used in courses to provide domain-specific industry insights, including insights and feedback on student work during synchronous meeting sessions. Expert instructors must have management experience and be in possession of at least a master’s level qualification. Expert instructors are under the direct authority of the Faculty Members and must be trained in Woolf’s pedagogical methods.

Faculty Advisors

Colleges at Woolf exist to support their members and provide helpful resources to students.

In the tradition of Harvard’s “Houses” and Oxford’s “Colleges”, Woolf provides every student with membership in a Woolf college for support during their academic journey. Every student should be assigned a Faculty Advisor, who is a faculty member from within the student’s own college, and who acts as the first point of contact for non-technical academic issues related to the student’s progress, particularly where these may benefit from an independent point of view. Students are strongly encouraged to meet with their advisors at least once each semester.

Thus every faculty member oversees their own registered students through the normal synchronous teaching sessions, and office hours, and additionally provides availability that can be booked for advisees, should the need arise.

Program Outline

Assessment and Grading

General Procedures

Academic assessment at Woolf is of two kinds: regular and cumulative. Regular assessment applies to the continuous evaluation of student progress, concentrating on the proficiency of submitted assignments, and the ability of the student to respond to issues raised by the instructor during an instructional session. Cumulative assessment applies to the final project assignment. This requires the students to deepen and extend the scholarly engagements initiated in their prior work.

Students who fail any one course of the degree, cannot progress to complete the degree, except by approval of the College Dean or College Academic Committee. Failed courses may be retaken at the approval of the College Dean or College Academic Committee, or by appeal, at the discretion of the Quality Assurance, Enhancement, and Technology Alignment Committee (QAETAC). For more information about QAETAC please see the Woolf Academic Handbook.

Cumulative Examination of Courses

Traditionally, cumulative examination of courses is by a submitted final project in the form of a long assignment.

The long assignment is meant to synthesize, deepen, and extend the learning outcomes of the regular lessons while introducing new material and insights. Not more than 50% of the long assignment may be material taken from other assignments. The topic of the assignment must be agreed in advance with the instructor. Examination assignments are expected to be completed at a high research standard, and must be well-structured, well-crafted, and contain appropriate citations to the primary and secondary literature of the course.

Mode of Teaching and Assessment

The Online Campus

Woolf University’s courses are offered almost exclusively through its proprietary learning platform. The platform supports both asynchronous and synchronous modes of learning. The asynchronous portion of programs includes structured course materials that the course lead and course instructors prepare ahead of time. These courses are done independently of students' classmates and according to the student’s own schedule, but prior to the synchronous sessions. Synchronous sessions are held in the “virtual classroom,” where students and faculty use internet technology such as video conferencing and web cameras to ensure they are actively engaged in the learning process. It is essential for students to connect with each other, share information, and create professional networks and relationships as they would in a traditional program or within a professional setting. For information about the technical specific requirements please see the Technical Requirements section within the Woolf Academic Handbook.

Structure of the Courses

The MBA combines asynchronous components (lecture videos, readings, and written assignments) and synchronous meetings attended by students and an instructor or faculty member during a video call.

Asynchronous components support the schedules of students from diverse work-life situations, and synchronous meetings provide accountability and motivation for students.

The program is composed of multiple short foundation courses, extended specialist courses, and a capstone project – the Digital Action Program for Business Administration.

Each short foundation course, and the extended specialist courses, consists of regular lessons and cumulative lessons devoted to summative examination. Each short foundation course requires 75 hours of learner time to complete, and each extended specialist course requires 250 hours to complete.

As is typical for synchronous teaching, the student will compose one assignment (such as a report, 1,000 word essay, financial model, or presentation) per lesson, which is the topic of meeting discussion. A full-time student completes two lessons per week with an assignment submitted for each lesson; this pattern continues for each regular lesson in the course.

Summative examination lessons allow an appropriate amount of time for the student to review and revise his or her prior work and deepen their synthetic grasp of the materials in preparation for cumulative examination or project.

The degree has a capstone project consisting of the Digital Action Program, in which students are grouped into cohorts and must work together on a real business problem. Over the course of the capstone, students use multidisciplinary approaches to perform critical analyses of real business issues in situations of uncertainty and incomplete information and develop an actionable solution, which is presented and assessed at the end of the capstone.

Contact Hours

For the breakdown of hours, consult the Pedagogical Procedures and Assessment sections.

Students engage in 8 synchronous meeting sessions in which questions and answers about asynchronous study materials are addressed.

Synchronous meeting engagements include not only 60-75 minutes of intensive contact time between the students and faculty member in every lesson (up to twice per week), but also extends beyond the synchronous meeting session itself to include ongoing supervisory support on an ad hoc basis (typically by email or brief virtual meeting). Students are closely supervised by asynchronous direction, oversight, feedback, and guidance; and occasionally new handouts or other scholarly materials are provided to follow up on issues raised in a synchronous meeting discussion. Thus, on our calculation, we allocate four further hours of contact time beyond the synchronous session to capture the individual, personalized, intensive, bespoke form of guidance that a student receives. We calculate all other forms of contact time at a 1:1 ratio, including lectures, whether delivered synchronously or as pre-recorded videos or podcasts.

Example regular lesson Breakdown

* = contact hours = 66

† = assessment hours = 1.25

Pedagogical Procedures

The MBA will be delivered using online and blended learning techniques, which support a variety of teaching and learning methods, including the following:

• synchronous meetings;
• assigned lectures by video or podcast;
• assigned readings;
• handouts delivered electronically;
• digital material, including slideshow presentations and other assigned media provided in course packets and by weblink.

The core pedagogical method used in this course will include synchronous meetings between a faculty member, or a subject expert instructor under the oversight of a faculty member, and a small group of students. Student interaction plays a key role in the organization of each synchronous meeting, which focuses on a discussion of a student’s pre-submitted assignment.

Online delivery, although identical in content for an in-person session, provides significant advantages to students in terms of accessibility – students can more easily reach academic experts across borders and more easily integrate study within the pattern of their own life or career. Further advantages of the online delivery include the digital quality assurance techniques outlined within the Academic Handbook.

Preparing for a single synchronous meeting requires about 21.25 hours. A representative workload consists of the following: students must review about 100 pages of reading material (or equivalent video content, audio content, or interactive content) and prepare a piece of written work of 2-4 pages in response to a specific set assignment question. Before the start of the synchronous session, this work is submitted to the instructor for review.

Every student must then be prepared to discuss and defend his or her written work directly with the instructor (who is an expert in the field) and the other students for up to 75 continuous minutes. Faculty members and subject experts seek to deepen the students’ understanding of the material and probe aspects of the written assignment that may benefit from clarification, revision, or further exploration.

At the end of the synchronous session, the instructor provides the student with feedback on the meeting assignment, including a mark, and provides bespoke guidance for the next assignment. Students are provided with a curated reading list from the instructors, assigned pre-recorded lectures, and a research question to guide the organization of their next synchronous meeting assignment or assignment. Engaging in this activity twice per week is a full workload of about 45 hours.

The synchronous meeting system is designed to be mentally demanding and personally engaging. The pedagogical style is known for producing high-quality domain-specific learning outcomes because students must learn assigned materials and related case studies for themselves, before presenting their work to an instructor in their own words for discussion twice per week. By requiring students to describe and analyze topics in their own words, synchronous meetings engage and extend a student’s existing range of abilities.

The synchronous method is also known for producing high-quality domain-agnostic learning outcomes because students must be prepared to organize and present their perspective on an assignment twice per week, and be prepared to think analytically and creatively about what they have done. Students must learn to present their viewpoint, even while being prepared to adopt a new position in light of the evidence and under the questioning of the teacher.

Assessment

General Procedures

For the MBA, assessment is of two kinds: regular assessment and summative assessment.

Regular assessment applies to the continuous evaluation of student progress, concentrating on the proficiency of submitted assignments, and the ability of the student to respond to issues raised by the instructor during a synchronous meeting session.

Cumulative assessment applies to the final project assignment. This requires the students to deepen and extend the scholarly engagements initiated in their prior work.

Students who fail any one course of the degree, cannot progress to complete the degree, and will by default fail the MBA. Failed courses may be re-taken at the discretion of Woolf’s Faculty Members.

Cumulative Examination of courses

For each course, a percentage of the grade derives from the average of the regular assignments, and a larger percentage of the grade derives from the cumulative examination. The cumulative examination of courses is by a submitted final project in the form of a long assignment.

The cumulative examination/long assignment is by summative assignment (3,000 word essay, or similarly-sized financial model, or presentation), which must synthesize, deepen, and extend the learning outcomes of the regular units while introducing new material and insights. Not more than 50% of the long assignment may be material taken from synchronous meeting assignments. The topic of the assignment must be agreed in advance with the faculty member and subject matter experts. Examination assignments are expected to be completed at a high research standard, and must be well-structured, well-crafted, and contain appropriate citations to the primary and secondary literature of the course.

Grading Progress

Students receive grades and feedback on each assignment throughout a course. Depending on the specific course, students may receive both a grade and a written or audio comment from an instructor. Courses display the weight assigned to each grade-bearing category (such as regular assignments, attendance, and/or final projects). Students have access to their grade book at all times and can see a record of all grades, attendance records, and assignment submissions.

The grade book displays the current running average for the grades in the course in accordance to the grade weights, inclusive of all those assignments which the student has submitted and on which the instructor has provided grades. At the end of the course, grades are finalized and added to the student’s transcript, which is accessible at all times for students enrolled in credit-bearing programs.

Grading System

The final grade for a course is determined by the weighting rules stated in the course offering. Unless otherwise stated, all courses are weighted as follows: 30% of the grade derives from the average of the instructional assignment session, and 70% of the grade derives from the cumulative examination.

The final grade on a degree is weighted in proportion to the credits of individual courses. For example, a degree composed of a 3 credit course and a 6 credit course will weigh the 6 credit courses proportionately more, according to the number of credits.

Woolf’s International Grade Classification

Woolf’s teachers are trained in a number of different grading scales; these scales are cross-referenced. This handbook employs the American grading system and classification, with US grades as the default.^[1] US grades are the most granular and distributed with the least number of gaps, which is why we have selected them as a default marking scheme for transcripts. Woolf’s international conversion scheme is as follows:

Woolf Grading Criteria, Definition of Grades, and Classification

Grading of student work keeps in view the scale of work that the student can reasonably be expected to have undertaken in order to complete the task. The Woolf grading scheme draws heavily from the marking scheme set out by the University of Oxford (cf. History Faculty Course Handbook 2016-2018).

a. The assessment of work for the course is defined according to the following rubric of general criteria:

i. i. Engagement:

• Directness of engagement with the question or task
• Range of issues addressed or problems solved
• Depth, complexity, and sophistication of comprehension of issues and implications of the question or task
• Effective and appropriate use of imagination and intellectual curiosity

ii. Argument or solution:

• Coherence, mastery, control, and independence of work
• Conceptual and analytical precision
• Flexibility, e.g. discussion of a variety of views, ability to navigate through challenges in creative ways

iii. Evidence (as relevant):

• Depth, precision, detail, range and relevance of evidence cited
• Accuracy of facts
• Knowledge of first principles and demonstrated ability reason from them
• Understanding of theoretical principles and/or historical debate
• Critical engagement with primary and/or secondary sources

iv. Organization and presentation:

• Clarity and coherence of structure
• Clarity and fluency of writing, code, prose, or presentation (as relevant)
• Correctness of conformity to conventions (code, grammar, spelling, punctuation or similar relevant conventions)

b. US grades for courses are defined according to the following rubric:

97-100

Work will be so outstanding that it could not be better within the scope of the assignment. These grades will be used for work that shows exceptional excellence in the relevant domain; including (as relevant to the domain): remarkable sophistication and mastery, originality or creativity, persuasive and well-grounded new ideas or methods, or making unexpected connections or solutions to problems.

94-96

Work will excel against each of the General Criteria. In at least one area, the work will be merely highly competent.

90-93

Work will excel in more than one area, and be at least highly competent in other respects. It must be excellent and contain: a combination of sophisticated engagement with the issues; analytical precision and independence of solution; go beyond paraphrasing or boilerplate code techniques; demonstrating quality of awareness and analysis of both first principles or primary evidence and scholarly debate or practical tradeoffs; and clarity and coherence of presentation. Truly outstanding work measured against some of these criteria may compensate for mere high competence against others.

87-89

Work will be at least very highly competent across the board, and excel in at least one group of the General Criteria. Relative weaknesses in some areas may be compensated by conspicuous strengths in others.

84-86

Work will demonstrate considerable competence across the General Criteria. They must exhibit some essential features addressing the issue directly and relevantly across a good range of aspects; offer a coherent solution or argument involving (where relevant) consideration of alternative approaches; be substantiated with accurate use of resources (including if relevant, primary evidence) and contextualization in debate (if relevant); and be clearly presented. Nevertheless, additional strengths (for instance, the range of problems addressed, the sophistication of the arguments or solutions, or the use of first principles) may compensate for other weaknesses.

80-83

Work will be competent and should manifest the essential features described above, in that they must offer direct, coherent, substantiated and clear arguments; but they will do so with less range, depth, precision and perhaps clarity. Again, qualities of a higher order may compensate for some weaknesses.

77-79

Work will show solid competence in solving problems or providing analysis. But it will be marred by weakness under one or more criteria: failure to fully solve the problem or discuss the question directly; some irrelevant use of technologies or citing of information; factual error, or error in selection of technologies; narrowness in the scope of solution or range of issues addressed or evidence adduced; shortage of detailed evidence or engagement with the problem; poor organization or presentation, including incorrect conformity to convention or written formatting. They may be characterized by unsubstantiated assertion rather than argument, or by unresolved contradictions in the argument or solution.

74-76

Work will show evidence of some competence in solving problems or providing analysis. It will also be clearly marred by weakness in multiple General Criteria, including: failure to solve the problem or discuss the question directly; irrelevant use of technologies or citing of information; factual errors or multiple errors in selection of technologies; narrowness in the scope of solution or range of issues addressed or evidence adduced; shortage of detailed evidence or engagement with the problem; poor organization or presentation, including incorrect conformity to convention or written formatting. They may be characterized by unsubstantiated assertion rather than argument, or by unresolved contradictions in the argument or solution.

70-73

Work will show evidence of competence in solving problems or providing analysis, but this evidence will be limited. It will be clearly marred by weakness in multiple General Criteria. It will still make substantive progress in addressing the primary task or question, but the work will lack a full solution or directly address the task; the work will contain irrelevant material; the work will show multiple errors of fact or judgment; and the work may fail to conform to conventions.

67-69

Work will fall down on a number of criteria, but will exhibit some of the qualities required, such as the ability to grasp the purpose of the assignment, to deploy substantive information or solutions in an effort to complete the assignment; or to offer some coherent analysis or work towards the assignment. Such qualities will not be displayed at a high level, and may be marred by irrelevance, incoherence, error and poor organization and presentation.

64-66

Work will fall down on multiple General Criteria, but will exhibit some vestiges of the qualities required, such as the ability to see the point of the question, to deploy information, or to offer some coherent work. Such qualities will be substantially marred by irrelevance, incoherence, error and poor organization and presentation.

60-63

Work will display a modicum of knowledge or understanding of some points, but will display almost none of the higher qualities described in the criteria. They will be marred by high levels of factual or technology error and irrelevance, generalization or boilerplate code and lack of information, and poor organization and presentation.

0-60

Work will fail to exhibit any of the required qualities. Candidates who fail to observe rubrics and rules beyond what the grading schemes allow for may also be failed.

c. Synchronous Meeting Discussions and Viva Voce Examination Template

Synchronous meeting discussions and viva voce examinations are conducted on the same format: written work is submitted in advance, and a discussion follows. This provides students an opportunity to clarify and explain their written claims, and it also tests whether the work is a product of the student’s own research or has been plagiarized.

For the viva voce examination, the submitted work is graded, and the grade is recorded prior to the oral examination.

The synchronous discussion and viva voce examination acts to shift the recorded grade on the submitted essay according to the following rubric:

+3

Up to three points are added for excellent performance; the student displays a high degree of competence across the range of questions, and excels in at least one group of criteria. Relative weaknesses in some areas may be compensated by conspicuous strengths in others.

+/- 0

The marked script is unchanged for fair performance. Answers to questions must show evidence of some solid competence in expounding evidence and analysis. But they will be marred by some weakness under one or more criteria: failure to discuss the question directly; appeal to irrelevant information; factual error; narrowness in the range of issues addressed or evidence adduced; shortage of detailed evidence; or poor organization and presentation, including consistently incorrect grammar. Answers may be characterized by unsubstantiated assertion rather than argument, or by unresolved contradictions in the argument.

-3 (up to three points)

Up to three are subtracted points for an inability to answer multiple basic questions about themes in the written work. Answers to questions will fall down on a number of criteria, but will exhibit some vestiges of the qualities required, such as the ability to see the point of the question, to deploy information, or to offer some coherent analysis towards an argument. Such qualities will not be displayed at a high level or consistently, and will be marred by irrelevance, incoherence, error and poor organization and presentation.

0

Written work and the oral examination will both be failed if the oral examination clearly demonstrates that the work was plagiarized. The student is unfamiliar with the arguments of the essay or the sources used for those arguments.

Curriculum

Business Finance, Accounting, and Economics

Short Foundation Course Description

Business Finance, Accounting, and Economics covers core concepts in accounting, finance, and microeconomics relevant to running a business.

The course begins with finance for business, including the time value of money, the trade-off between risk and return, and arbitrage. It gives managers a strengthened knowledge in finance that can be applied in their professional careers. The topics covered include how to move cash flows in time, the methods and principles of capital budgeting, valuation of bonds and stocks, how to characterize risk and return, and options pricing with applications to managerial decisions.

The course then builds on the student’s knowledge of finance to introduce accounting and examines the subject from the viewpoint of users external to the organization. Topics include transaction analysis; the accounting cycle; financial-statement preparation, use, and analysis; revenue recognition and cost measurement; present value; and problems in financial-accounting disclosure.

This course concludes with microeconomic theory and its application to problems faced by managers. Topics include supply and demand, consumer behavior, pricing when a firm has market power, and the role of contracts.

Business Leadership and Strategy

Short Foundation Course Description

This course examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The course develops managerial and leadership competencies, focusing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance.

The course provides students with concepts to support them across their careers as they continue to develop effective skills in delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people across an organization.

Business Marketing and Operations

Short Foundation Course Description

This course explores the key concepts of marketing and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and operational decisions. It presents both the practical “how” and the fundamental “why” of marketing activities in the light of contributions from behavioral science, economics, and statistics. The course provides managers and business leaders with the understanding needed to manage and lead those who implement the marketing activities; the course provides concepts and processes for business leaders who seek to continue developing through future experiences or coursework in marketing.

The course then focuses on managing processes. Theoretically, it models business functions as a network of actions that convert inputs into outputs. Process design is considered, including the volume and variety of system inputs and outputs - especially with respect to goods and services. Different inventory management and logistic systems are explored. Finally, forecasting and process optimisation are explored, strengthening managers ability to operate with finite resources.

Business Negotiations

Short Foundation Course Description

Managers require a broad array of negotiating skills to implement business solutions — this requires an advanced knowledge of negotiation models, the competence to select the right strategy, and the tactical skills to achieve desired outcomes through negotiation.

In addition to studying key negotiation theories, the course develops skills in negotiation, providing participants with the opportunity to test and improve their abilities through group discussions that model negotiation scenarios, through the use of case studies, and through reflection and feedback.

Students will review and try out various approaches to negotiate conflict resolution (at small personal scales and large organizational scales). The course builds competencies in developing an effective professional and personal style of negotiation.

Creativity and Innovation

Short Foundation Course Description

In this course students will develop specialized and multidisciplinary capacities to generate creative solutions and alternatives to existing business issues. It is designed to introduce and deepen the student's ability to lead processes that stimulate and manage creativity in a business.

Students will reflect critically on templates and methods for designing, implementing, and assessing processes that introduce creativity to real work situations. The course will engage with both the theoretical frameworks and practical methods or tools for cultivating practices of creativity in response to real business challenges.

The course cultivates skills for autonomous managers to lead creative projects, people and ventures, and to oversee the processes that keep them on track.

Effective Managerial Communication

Short Foundation Course Description

In this course, students will gain the capacity to appropriately apply a broad repertoire of communication skills in business, professional, and social contexts.

The course scrutinizes and analyzes managerial communication skills required for leadership in a wide variety of industries. It considers the varied means of communications - writing, speaking, calling – and generally appearing professional. The communication requirements of different contexts are studied, including informational, persuasive, and relational forms of communication.

Course videos, readings, and case studies prepare students for group discussion and assignments that support the learning outcomes.

Ethical Issues for Managers

Short Foundation Course Description

Ethical dilemmas are frequently encountered in the workplace, in every function of the organization, and at every level. Knowing how to deal with ethical issues is critical in being able to be an effective leader. Additionally, the range and complexity of ethical issues have increased in recent years, as well as expectations of responsible corporate conduct; knowing how to deal with such concerns is an important part of management today.

In this course, students examine how organizations, and individuals within them, can deal with ethical issues and dilemmas at the collective and personal levels. Throughout the course, students will gain skills related to elements of ethical decision-making, the psychological aspects related to business ethics, and ethics in the global marketplace. The course will focus on how business leaders can make ethical decisions, skilfully manage ethical issues in the workplace, and help encourage ethics in a variety of organizations.

Evidence-Based Decision-Making

Short Foundation Course Description

In this course students will strengthen their capacity to lead individuals, teams, and organizations in processes that generate data-driven solutions to problems and data-driven insights into customer behavior in order to facilitate data-driven decision making.

This course provides the foundations of probability and statistics required for a manager to interpret large quantities of data and to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and in both structured and unstructured settings. Theoretical topics include decision trees, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, and sampling.

Financial Accounting and Reporting

Short Foundation Course Description

In general terms, financial accounting is the measurement of economic activity for decision-making. Financial statements are a key product of this measurement process and an important component of firms’ financial reporting activities.

The objective of this course is to help students become intelligent readers of the financial reports of most publicly traded companies. Students will learn the development, analysis, and use of these reports by focusing on what these reports contain, what assumptions and concepts accountants use to prepare them, and why they use those assumptions and concepts. A solid understanding of the fundamentals covered in this course should enable students to do well in more advanced finance and accounting courses and to interview intelligently for jobs in finance, consulting, and general management.

The course begins with the basic concepts of accounting. Students will analyze the main financial statements: balance sheet, income statement, statement of cash flows, and statement of stockholders’ equity. Particular attention is paid to how these four statements relate to each other and how they provide information about the operating performance and financial health of a company. The course also covers specific items from the financial statements and applies tools of analysis whenever possible.

Integrative and Strategic Thinking

Short Foundation Course Description

In this course students will gain the capacity to understand how firms work in a global context, incorporating a broad, future-oriented, systems-based approach that uses data, information and insights from diverse perspectives and sources. This course is designed to convey the key concepts of strategic thinking and how they fit into the larger context of management strategy and decisions. Students will be presented with both the practical “how” and the fundamental “why” in the light of contributions from behavioral science, economics, and statistics.

Leading People, Teams and Organizations: Organizational Theory

Short Foundation Course Description

This course will approach leadership by identifying practices that researchers and practitioners have shown to be the most effective. Through these processes, students will gain a broad range of skills.

This course examines how leaders can most effectively use the resources of their team members to achieve business outcomes. The course develops managerial and leadership competencies, focusing on how key improvements in the general strategy and techniques of managing people can produce outcomes more significant than isolated improvements to employee performance. The course provides students with concepts to support them across their careers as they continue to develop effective delegation, management strategy, and engagement with people inside of an organization.

Specific topics covered include managing a diverse workforce; self-leadership; perception pitfalls; decision making; conflict resolution; emotional intelligence; improving performance; team structure.

Marketing Strategy

Short Foundation Course Description

The role of marketing management in organizations is to identify and measure the needs and wants of consumers, to determine which targets the business can serve, to decide on the appropriate offerings to serve these markets, and to determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the firm’s offerings. Successful organizations are those that integrate the objectives and resources of the organization with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace. The goal of this course is to facilitate student achievement of these goals regardless of career path.

This course addresses how to design and implement the best combination of marketing efforts to carry out a firm's strategy in its target markets. Specifically, this course helps to develop the student's understanding of how the firm can benefit by creating and delivering value to its customers, and stakeholders, and develop skills in applying the analytical concepts and tools of marketing to such decisions as segmentation and targeting, branding, pricing, distribution, and promotion.

Reflective Leadership

Short Foundation Course Description

In this course students will cultivate and deepen their capacity to reflect continually on their learning and growth; they will examine the ways in which one’s behaviors and decision-making impact others, with a goal of leading with integrity.

This course is designed to extend students' conceptual and practical understanding of leadership in organizations, reaching beyond the application of knowledge in practical judgements that achieve business outcomes, to embrace wider social and ethical considerations. The course is experiential and multidisciplinary, requiring participants to reflect on the social and ethical responsibilities of leaders in relation to their own experiences. It is designed to help students discover insights about themselves as leaders, fostering the development of a self-awareness, including strengths and opportunities for personal growth.

In addition, the course provides a context for enhancing the skills and competencies that enable a student to become an effective leader in today's highly dynamic, diverse and adaptive organizations.

Statistics and Data Analysis

Short Foundation Course Description

This course is designed to achieve an understanding of fundamental notions of data presentation and analysis and to use statistical thinking in the context of business problems.

The course addresses modern methods of data exploration (designed to reveal unusual or problematic aspects of databases), the uses and abuses of the basic techniques of inference, and the use of regression as a tool for management and for financial analysis. The potential ethical issues related to each topic will be reviewed. Socially and environmentally relevant data will be utilized throughout the course.

The goal of the course is not to turn students into statisticians but to enable them to appreciate the use of probability in assessing evidence and making decisions, and to be statistically literate consumers of quantitative information generated by economists, biomedical researchers, psychologists, statisticians, survey researchers, and other experts.

Strategic Economics

Short Foundation Course Description

This course explores basic economic principles (theories and applications) that are relevant to a variety of businesses. The course emphasizes an economist's mindset and amasses the tools necessary to do so, including the study of microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Throughout the course, students will examine the underlying economics of successful business strategy: the strategic imperatives of competitive markets, the sources and dynamics of competitive advantage, managing competitive interactions, and the organizational implementation of business strategy.

Additionally, the course focuses on case discussion and analysis and provides a foundation for consultants, managers, and corporate finance generalists.

Supply Chain Management

Short Foundation Course Description

Increases in product variety and customization in the past few years have posed challenges to firms in terms of delivering products to customers faster and more efficiently. With the prevalence of the usage of the Internet for business, electronic business transformations are occurring in every business. One of the fundamental enablers of electronic commerce is effective supply chain management. Thus, supply chain management has become the focus of attention of senior management in the industry today.

This course considers management of a supply chain in a global environment from a managerial perspective. The focus is on analysis, management, and improvement of supply chain processes and their adaptation to the electronic business environment. The course focuses on six topics: Inventory and Information Management; Distribution and Transportation; Global Operations; Supplier Management; Management of Product Variety; and Electronic Supply Chains. Several new concepts including Prognostic Supply Chains, Build-to-Order, Collaborative Forecasting, Delayed Differentiation, Cross Docking, Global Outsourcing, and Efficient Consumer Response will also be discussed. At the end of the course, a student will have the necessary tools and metrics to evaluate a current supply chain and recommend design changes to supply chain processes

Technology and Operations Management

Short Foundation Course Description

This course enables students to develop the skills and concepts needed to ensure the ongoing contribution of a firm's operations to its competitive position. It helps them to understand the complex processes underlying the development and manufacture of products as well as the creation and delivery of services. Throughout the course, students will receive a comprehensive overview of technology utilization to drive a competitive advantage for company operations. Students explore various technology solutions for business process automation, including value proposition analysis across organization functions.

Specific topics addressed include process analysis; cross-functional and cross-firm integration; product development; information technology; and technology and operations strategy.

Additionally, students will analyze how technology can be leveraged to improve product development during the four lifecycle phases. The course provides a detailed overview of the impact of technology on various operating models such as manufacturing, supply chain management, customer-facing, product development, and support functions.

Working with Others

Short Foundation Course Description

In this course students will deepen and extend their ability to create and maintain high-quality relationships with people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and possess different points of view in order to create and execute processes that produce successful outcomes and results.

This course teaches business managers and leaders to reflect critically on concepts from the behavioral sciences that can be applied to a fast changing business environment to improve their abilities to lead and manage in organizations.

Behavioral frameworks for individuals, teams, and organizations are evaluated critically and discussed in the context of real-world cases. Synchronous meeting groups provide practice in problem-based teamwork, communicating in specialist and non-specialist registers, and in applying the frameworks in practice.

The Business of Social Change

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge to influence and lead social impact in business and impact contexts. By the conclusion of this course, students should have a strong foundation in social impact and social change, including approaches to funding impact, scaling programmes, and interventions, public-private partnerships, corporate engagement, impact investment decision-making, blended capital, and approaches to intentional impact.

The course will pivot around multiple case studies addressing social issues through which students learn and test social impact frameworks and concepts. Once students have gained a mastery of perspectives and methodologies necessary to consider and address a social issue from the ground up, they will next learn to identify and utilize effective measures of outputs and progress and explore the core levers and potentials to change outcomes for people, communities and market systems.

Business-to-Business Marketing

Extended Specialist Course Description

The focus of this course is to introduce concepts, skills, and strategies for performing competitively in the business market where organizations rather than households are the customers.

This course provides a managerial introduction to the strategic and tactical aspects of business marketing decisions and marketing channel strategy. Students examine the strategic concepts and tools that guide market selection, successful differentiation in business markets, and supply chain management. Students will examine how product and service decisions are designed to deliver the B2B value proposition, how pricing captures customer value, how value is communicated to and among customers, and how marketing channels are used to make this value accessible to target customers. Additionally, students will compare and contrast how the strategic and tactical processes of developing and managing value-generating relationships differ between B2B and B2C markets. Moreover, students will also gain an understanding of how to manage channel power, conflict, and relationships.

Data Analytics and Modeling

Extended Specialist Course Description

The objective of this course is to provide students the basic data analysis and modeling concepts and methodologies using probability theory. Basic statistics concepts and probability concepts will be covered. Fundamental data analysis and hypothesis techniques will be covered. Further data modeling methodologies such as Hidden Markov Models and Bayesian networks will be introduced.

Students successfully completing this course will have gained a solid understanding of probabilistic data modeling, interpretation, and analysis and thus have formed an important basis to solve practical statistics and data analysis-related problems arising in real-world business situations. The techniques discussed are applied in all functional areas within business organizations including accounting, finance, human resource management, marketing, operations, and strategic planning.

Decision Making with Business Analytics

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course encompasses statistics, decision analysis, and simulation modeling.

Throughout the course, students will strengthen their capacity to lead individuals, teams, and organizations in processes that generate data-driven solutions to problems, data-driven insights into customer behavior, and data-driven decision-making. This course provides the foundations of probability and statistics required for a manager to interpret large quantities of data and to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty, with incomplete information, and in both structured and unstructured settings. Theoretical topics include decision trees, hypothesis testing, multiple regression, Monte Carlo simulation, and sampling and estimation.

Enterprise Risk Management

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course provides an introduction to the main areas of Enterprise Risk Management. This course also covers Risk Management processes and strategies. Numerous case studies from various business sectors will illustrate the increasing importance of Enterprise Risk Management.

Financial Crises and Risk Management

Extended Specialist Course Description

Throughout this course, students will develop the analytical tools necessary to understand crisis prevention and management, and risk management. The properties and characteristics of risk management techniques will be analyzed and related to corporate and sovereign default risk, hedging and trading strategies, regulation, and assessing financial stability and systemic risk. Emphasis will be put on applying these techniques to problems emerging in the marketplace.

Additionally, this course addresses the ability of different risk management approaches to account for large market shocks. Students will study the effect of leverage, through borrowing or through the structuring of assets, in amplifying shocks and increasing risk, and the role of capital in mitigating them. The information learned in this course will help business leaders understand their role in regulatory compliance and participate constructively in these interactions.

Financial Statement Analysis

Extended Specialist Course Description

Financial reports contain important information about a company's past, present, and future. The ability to read these reports provides valuable insights into an organization's strengths and shortcomings.

This course is designed to prepare students to interpret and analyze financial statements for tasks such as credit and security analyses, lending and investment decisions, and other decisions that rely on financial data. Throughout the course, students will explore in greater depth financial reporting from the perspective of financial statement users. Students will develop a sufficient understanding of the concepts and recording procedures and therefore will be able to interpret various disclosures in an informed manner. Additionally, students will learn how to compare companies financially, understand cash flow, and grasp basic profitability issues and risk analysis concepts.

Global Brand Strategy

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course examines specific issues involved in building and managing global brands in such a way that they contribute to shareholder value. A global brand uses the same name and logo and has awareness, availability, and acceptance in multiple regions of the world. It shares the same strategic principles, values, positioning, and marketing throughout the world. Although the marketing mix can vary, it is managed in an internationally coordinated manner.

Throughout this course, students will develop skills related to building strong global brands; developing marketing mix strategies that are an effective combination of global standardization, local adaptation, and worldwide learning; and managing global brands.

Global Finance and Emerging Markets

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course develops the foundations for financial decisions in a global economic environment. It concentrates on four areas: markets, tools, investments, and corporations. Students will become familiar with the benefits of international diversification in investment strategies. Additional topics include the valuation of international investments and analysis of the functioning of international financial markets and institutions.

Throughout the courses, students will also develop skills related to the management of foreign exchange exposure in international corporations within the specific context of emerging markets.

Health, Safety, and Leadership Essentials

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course has been designed to foster a strong safety culture by disseminating safe behaviors throughout the organization, with a strong focus on leadership development at all levels.

Implementation and Product Introduction

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course provides students with advanced methods needed to understand how a product will fit into a competitive market, and how to introduce the product into that market. This includes advanced research on the receptiveness of a market to the new product, as well as strategies for defining and finding the market that will be most receptive to the product.

Students consider product introductions with the goal of what Marc Andreesen called “product/market fit” - a “good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

The course trains students to reflect upon and analyze a company’s go-to-market strategy, and it provides students with sophisticated methods of calculating customer acquisition cost, determining customer break-even, and calculating customer lifetime value.

Inclusive Leadership

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course focuses on multiple aspects of team dynamics and structure, with a focus on the organizational intelligence needed to lead and manage diverse organizations in a varied marketplace. Theories of organizational behavior, social psychology, and anthropology are critically discussed in relation to real-world scenarios.

Additionally, this course introduces students to the challenges and opportunities faced in multifaceted workplaces and provides evidence-based insights and practical strategies for how to accelerate team engagement and belonging as a pathway to sustainability and competitive advantage. Ultimately, this course enables students to successfully build and lead organizations that are multifaceted, equitable, and engaging.

Inspiration and Product Creation

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course provides students with advanced methods and frameworks for understanding customer needs, and for translating those needs into a program of research and product development that can be used to create a successful new product or service. It equips students with skills to generate new product hypotheses, to research the potential of a new product or entrepreneurial venture, and to adjust the product offering to fit the needs of customers. This course instills the all-important distinction between a “bright idea” and a “business opportunity” in new product creation.

Using disciplined methods of customer and market analysis, students will gain advanced abilities in defining the core customers for a new product or entrepreneurial venture.

Students will study the complex combination of factors that influence customers to adopt a new product or service. They will gain a comprehensive understanding of what makes entrepreneurial selling unique, and why it is valuable to integrate key aspects of selling and marketing activities in a new venture. Students will learn how to select potential customers through data collection, including customer interviews, and students will learn how to analyze that data to refine a product offering.

International Business Environments

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course explores the international business environment in which organizations operate. Throughout the course, students will examine the structure and features of international markets, how organizations engage with these markets, and how they respond to their complexities. Students are introduced to useful theoretical and analytical frameworks that are crucial to understanding the opportunities and risks derived from the political, economic, social, technological, and institutional environment of countries.

The course also addresses aspects of global institutions, such as the World Trade organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which set global rules that affect business strategy and human welfare.

Introduction to Strategic Healthcare Management

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course is aimed at providing business-related knowledge in healthcare management. The course prepares learners with a core understanding of the various issues of health programs and systems with good operative business processes along with a deep understanding of the quality leadership required in the healthcare industry and ensuring good healthcare financial management principles.

Investment Strategies

Extended Specialist Course Description

Throughout this course, students will learn the basic concepts of needs analysis, investment policy, asset allocation, product selection, portfolio monitoring and rebalancing. Students will assess the various types of institutional investors, including pension funds and insurance companies and develop skills related to the client management life cycle and portfolio management as a process. The course will address the basic concepts, principles, and the major styles of investing in alternative assets. Additionally, students will learn about the impact of digitization on investment strategies and the issues related to performance measurement, transaction costs and liquidity risk, margin requirements, risk management, and portfolio construction. Other topics addressed in the course include quantitative investment strategies used by active traders and methodologies to analyze them. Through the use of case studies, students will learn to use real data to back-test or evaluate several of the most successful trading strategies used by active investment managers. As a result, students will learn to read and analyze academic research articles in search of profitable and implementable trading ideas.

Leadership and Corporate Accountability

Extended Specialist Course Description

In this course, students learn about the complex responsibilities facing business leaders today. Through cases about difficult managerial decisions, the course examines the legal, ethical, and economic responsibilities of corporate leaders. It also teaches students about management and governance systems leaders can use to promote responsible conduct by companies and their employees, and shows how personal values can play a critical role in effective leadership.

Additionally, this course is designed to deepen and extend students' conceptual and practical understanding of leadership in organizations, extending beyond the application of knowledge in practical judgements that achieve business outcomes, to embrace wider social and ethical considerations. The course is experiential and multidisciplinary, requiring participants to reflect on the social and ethical responsibilities of leaders in relation to their own experiences. It is designed to help students discover insights about themselves as leaders, fostering the development of self-awareness, including strengths and opportunities for personal growth.

Marketing Analytics

Extended Specialist Course Description

The role of marketing management in organizations is to identify and measure the needs and wants of consumers, to determine which targets the business can serve, to decide on the appropriate offerings to serve these markets, and to determine the optimal methods of pricing, promoting, and distributing the firm’s offerings. Successful organizations are those that integrate the objectives and resources of the organization with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace. The goal of this course is to facilitate student achievement of these goals regardless of career path.

Throughout the course, students will study various tools for generating marketing insights from data in such areas as segmentation, targeting and positioning, satisfaction management, customer lifetime analysis, customer choice, product and price decisions using conjoint analysis, and text analysis, and search analytics.

Measurement and Product Adoption

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course examines iterative product development as a method for improving customer adoption and retention. Students will gain a mastery of iterative product development as a strategy for (a) transforming market research into potential solutions, (b) testing hypotheses about product improvements, and (c) gaining validation for product adjustments.

Students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the concept of a minimum viable product, how to test the market in the early stages of product adoption, and the benefits and weaknesses of incremental product improvements. Students will gain an advanced understanding of concepts related to customer segmentation, cohort analysis, and churn in order to learn from market responses to product changes, increase customer retention, and expand customer adoption.

Operations Management in Global Healthcare

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course will help learners develop specialized knowledge and domain expertise in efficient management of a healthcare services center in a global context. The course also helps learners develop an awareness of problems confronted by organizations and businesses in the global healthcare sector and also equips learners with a definitive idea of change management and lean operational tools required for analyzing and improving healthcare processes.

Python for Business Analytics

Extended Specialist Course Description

This course introduces students to one of the world’s most widely used and in-demand programming languages and its specific applications to business analytics. Python is used in a wide range of fields, including web development, data science, fin-tech, health care, and more. With Python, business leaders can scrape online sources to determine consumer sentiment, automate tasks, run advanced models, and export code across different applications.

Throughout the course will develop the following skills: Apply programmatic logic to complex business problems in areas such as finance, operations, and marketing; Use technical knowledge to lead and manage teams in today’s evolving digital economy; Leverage state-of-the-art tools and powerful, open-source Python libraries to clean, analyze and visualize data.

Services Marketing Management

Extended Specialist Course Description

Service organizations (e.g., hospitals, hotels, banks, insurance companies, professional services, educational institutions) require a different approach from that of goods and high-tech businesses. Additionally, many goods and high-tech businesses also use a strong service component as a source of competitive advantage.

Services marketing is often viewed in terms of outcomes, but services marketing is also an ongoing analytic process. In this course, students will learn how to properly analyze frameworks, tools, channels, data sets, customer behavioral data, decision-making factors, and strategies that support broader marketing decisions. Throughout the course, students will build on basic marketing concepts and apply them to service industry settings.

Social Entrepreneurship

Extended Specialist Course Description

Social Entrepreneurship is a dynamic business field that examines the practice of identifying, starting, and growing successful mission-driven for-profit and non-profit ventures. This course provides students with the skills to develop in-depth insights into economic and social value creation across several areas, including poverty alleviation, energy, health, and sustainability. Through case studies, lectures, and discussions, students will learn to think strategically and act opportunistically with a socially-conscious business mindset.

Topics addressed throughout this course include problem/opportunity assessment, resource acquisition, and social and financial returns on investments. Students will critically assess various social and organizational models that directly affect diverse populations throughout the world.

Strategic Project Management and Implementation

Extended Specialist Course Description

The purpose of this course is to give learners an opportunity to integrate all the knowledge from their programme of learning by developing a project in which they plan and implement a new product, service or process. Learners need to take a full and active role in all aspects of the project, and the selection of an appropriate management issue is crucial to success. Learners will cover a full range of management activities and roles, including resource and people management and implementation of change. The result needs to be a substantial report in a style appropriate for consideration by senior management

Digital Action Program for Business Administration

Course Description

The Digital Action Program for Business Administration provides a capstone course in which students deepen and apply their learning through a “Digital Action Program” (DAP). In the DAP, students are grouped into cohorts (typically five students) and must work both individually and together on a specific, real, contemporary business consultancy problem, normally proposed by a cooperating organization (corporation or non-profit), which results in a comprehensive solution proposal.

This provides students with a real world business consultancy engagement, and the opportunity to produce, both individually and as a team, a substantial piece of relevant, scholarly, and actionable research, to be presented directly to stakeholders in the cooperating organization.

Over the course of the DAP, students fulfill the learning objectives:

• each student demonstrates their comprehensive knowledge and understanding of key business processes;
• each student uses multidisciplinary approaches to perform critical analyses of real business issues in situations of uncertainty and incomplete information in order to develop an actionable solution;
• each student practices teamwork, exercises their leadership skills, and reflects on their own performance and the performance of their cohort; and
• each student communicates to members of their cohort, the cooperating organization, and faculty members from Woolf.

Students are required to demonstrate autonomy, individual scholarly acumen, self-reflection in their engagement with peers, role adaptability within their cohort, and teamwork while engaged in the DAP.

The goal of the DAP is to:

1. fulfill the learning objectives and
2. to produce a project portfolio containing an analysis of the business problem and the proposed solution.

DAP Roles and Responsibilities

Individual students

Students are required to take responsibility for their own work, they must act autonomously on the basis of their prior learning and experience, and they must individually generate key research results that contribute to the DAP.

Each student must individually contribute through assignment submissions, which are graded on their individual merits. The final grade for the course (as described below) consists of 50% for the individual research submissions, and 50% for the cohort's final project taken as a whole. The final project contains individual contributions, but requires teamwork, and is graded as whole in terms of its fulfillment of the learning objectives.

Cohorts

Cohorts are groups of about 5 students that are assigned to address a single business problem, on which they commit to working both individually and as a team. All cohorts must agree to a cohort charter, which outlines the roles and responsibilities of the team. The cohort charter must include the following topics: timeliness; comprehensive designation of areas of responsibility, including gathering meeting agenda items, chairing meetings, meeting note-taking, and being the point of contact for the cooperating organization; a schedule of rotating leadership positions across the courses, and a commitment to professional teamwork that prioritizes the goal of the DAP.

Instructors

All cohorts are assigned a Woolf instructor to facilitate three cohort synchronous meetings for each lesson, and all cohorts are assigned a designated contact person from a cooperating organization.

The role of the instructor in cohort synchronous meetings is to ensure that students are achieving the learning objectives, and that the cohort is on course with their program roadmap. As the DAP progresses, students are expected to increase their management over the synchronous meetings, including setting the meeting agenda.

Cooperating Organizations

Cooperating organizations must register and be verified with Woolf, provide an initial portfolio of basic information on the company, provide a designated contact person, and agree to the standard 'cooperating organization framework' – which commits them to attending a minimum number of meetings with a cohort, and they are encouraged to provide students with access to the executive members of their organization.

In cases where relations with a cooperating organization become untenable for any reason, and the cohort is unable to continue with the relationship, then cohorts will be provided with the choice of (a) continuing their DAP without further input from the cooperating organization, (b) switching to a new cooperating organization, or (c) selecting a contemporary business problem on the basis of publicly available information and in agreement with their instructor.

DAP Timeline of Assignments

Each lesson of the course normally requires about 75 hours of work from each member of the cohort. Individuals must complete their projects on schedule – neither early nor late – and in response to the requirements of their project; cohorts have the opportunity to adjust the amount of time dedicated to each lesson.

The cohort meetings are an opportunity for the instructor to check in on the team progress; they are a key checkpoint for individual submissions, and they provide milestones in the progress of the DAP. Before every cohort meeting, each student is required to submit a status report on individual and team performance.

At the end of the DAP, every cohort submits a Final Report, Final Presentation, and the Final Reflection on their experience.

The Final Report consists of the following components:

1. Title, abstract, and table of contents

2. Industry and competition report

3. Report on the cooperating organization

4. Report on the business problem

5. Report on the potential solutions analyzing their merits and weakness

6. Recommended solution with implementation plan

7. Full financial model

8. Bibliography

Items 2-7 (which may be adjusted in coordination with the cohort instructor), each have a Directly Responsible Individual (the DRI), who undertakes all the research for the section of the Final Report. Each DRI must elicit feedback and review from other members of the cohort, who must contribute feedback to every other section of the report.

The Final Presentation is typically a slide deck between 20 and 40 slides, and it is a fully collaborative project.

The Final Reflection is a reflective analysis on the DAP experience, and it must contain an individual report from each member and a joint concluding statement.

The course concludes with each member providing a peer review of their cohort peers, including strengths and areas of improvement.

The timeline of the course assignments is set by the cohort at the start, and adjusted in consultation with the instructor as the DAP progresses. The outline of assignment submissions is as follows:

Lesson 1

• Standard cohort charter discussed, revised, and agreed

• Project timeline with designated areas of responsibility

Lessons 2-3

• Draft title and abstract for the final report

• Industry information gathering

• Draft report on the cooperating organization

• Draft report on the industry landscape

Lessons 4-5

• Problem and opportunity diagnoses

• Creative generation of varied potential solutions

Lessons 6

• Evaluation of potential solutions

• Preliminary financial models of potential solutions

Lessons 7-8

• Recommended solution

• Implementation plan

Lessons 9-10

• Final Report

• Final Presentation

• Final Reflection and cohort debrief

• Peer evaluation

Outcomes

The graduate will be able to:

• Showcase a culmination of all of the skills that they have learned and developed across the entire degree.
• Apply their learned knowledge, skills, and competencies to a real world business problem
• Balance working independently and collectively as a team to operate in a professional real-world environment

Graduates of the course will show competencies in:

• Leading discussions of key issues related to their contemporary business problem
• Applying professional and scholarly approaches to research problems pertaining to their contemporary business problem
• Efficiently managing interdisciplinary issues that arise in connection with analyzing and proposing a solution to their contemporary business problem
• Autonomous self-direction in research and originality in solutions developed over this course
• Identifying research problems and solutions related to their contemporary business problem; and acting as a professional team member
• Management and leadership decision-making as it relates to their contemporary business problem

Graduates of the course will show knowledge in:

• The presentation of issues and solutions related to their contemporary business problem
• Key strategies for assessing, operationalizing and executing on their contemporary business problem
• Any and all diverse scholarly views which relate to their contemporary business problem
• Applicable business theories even tangentially related to the and solution of their contemporary business problem
• Interpersonal team dynamics to maximizing individual contributor and team efficiencies and effectiveness

Graduates of the course will develop skills in:

• Autonomously gathering materials and organizing them into a coherent, comprehensive presentation
• Employing modern conventions for the presentation of scholarly work and scholarly referencing
• Creatively applying the theories learned over the course of the degree to develop critical and original solutions to their contemporary business problem
• Applying their in-depth, domain-specific knowledge and understanding to their contemporary business problem

Graduates of the course will be able to exercise the following judgment and critical ability skills:

• Assess, analyze, criticize and correct the various strategies for handling matters arising in the context of their contemporary business problem
• Compare and evaluate the different methodologies recommended in scholarly sources pertaining to their contemporary business problem
• Propose solutions to complex and changing problems pertaining their contemporary business problem

How will this course be taught?

The core pedagogical method used in this course will consist of synchronous meetings between an instructor (faculty member or a subject-expert instructor under the oversight of a faculty member), and a group of students in a cohort (normally 4-6 students in a cohort). Student interaction plays a key role in the organization of each synchronous meeting.

The role of the instructor in a cohort’s synchronous meetings is to ensure that students are achieving the learning objectives, and that the cohort is on course with their Digital Action Program roadmap. As the Capstone in Business Administration progresses, students are expected to increase their management over the synchronous meetings, including setting the meeting agenda for key discussion points of their progress. Students submit status reports before every synchronous meeting.

Preparing for each cohort synchronous meeting session requires about 25 hours of work, and cohort students must maintain regular communication with each other as they coordinate their project assignments, in accordance with the cohort charter.

How will this course be assessed?

For the Digital Action Program (DAP), 50% of the mark derives from each individual’s cohort meeting submissions (individual status reports and related lesson submissions) and 50% from the cohort’s final report, final presentation deck, final reflection, and peer evaluation on the team’s performance.

The DAP follows Woolf’s General Marking Criteria, Definition of Marks, and Classification as published in the Woolf Academic Handbook in the year of student enrolment.

1. Cf. the Fulbright Commission (http://www.fulbright.org.uk/going-to-the-usa/pre-departure/academics), Princeton Review (https://www.princetonreview.com/college-advice/gpa-college-admissions), European Commission (https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/second-cycle-programmes-49_en), and University of Malta (https://www.um.edu.mt/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/47390/harmonisedregs-09.pdf). ↑