Online MBA Program Overview, Curriculum and Courses

Online MBA Program Overview, Curriculum and Courses

100% Flexible MBA program that meets you exactly where you are.

The Eller Online MBA program offers the perfect blend of academic excellence and schedule adaptability. The program offers six start dates per year. Allowing you to finish at a pace that works for you, complete your degree in as little as 14 months or up to two and a half years. Finish the program without sacrificing too much work or family time along the way.

7

areas of concentration

6

program starts per year

14-48

month completion time


What You’ll Learn

Today’s global marketplace is rapidly evolving. Here, you’ll learn to not only stay a step ahead—you’ll learn to truly lead, wherever you set your sights in the business world. We’ll cover areas including:

  • A core set of rigorous and analytically oriented business topics such as finance, accounting, marketing, economics, operations, management, information systems, leadership and business communications.
  • The fundamentals for success in individual and team-based settings
  • Experiential learning, managerial and business communications capabilities and professional development activities
  • An optional Global Business Experience trip

Curriculum

Online MBA courses are offered in a carousel format, repeating every 12 months.

There are two sessions per semester, and a typical session offers two core courses and a minimum of two electives. To complete your degree, you’ll take 45 credits, including 28 core units and 17 elective units.

You’ll emerge ready to supercharge your career and change your life for good.

This course provides an introduction to the financial accounting and reporting process from a user's perspective. This course focuses on fundamental accounting concepts and principles. You will learn how the economic transactions of an enterprise are reported in the financial statements and related disclosures. The goals of the course are to provide you with a basic set of skills that can be used to understand and analyze financial statements.

The primary emphasis of this course is the preparation and use of accounting information to aid in planning and controlling operations and making non-routine decisions concerned with formulating major plans and policies. 

This course introduces a strategic approach to professional communication (writing and speaking). Key components include: audience analysis, communicator credibility, message construction, design, and delivery.

Microeconomic theory and applications for business management decision making.

Development of business strategies to promote the competitive performance of firms.

Provides students with an overview of the basic concepts and analytical techniques employed in corporate finance. The goal of this class is to provide a solid foundation in the fundamentals of finance enabling students to pursue further study in any area of finance. 

The purpose of this course is to build on the theoretical knowledge, concepts, and analytical techniques of finance learned in FIN 510A. The focus will be on the application of principles applied to casework using Excel spreadsheets. The goal of this class is to enable students to be fully prepared for summer internships. 

This course focuses on the skills you will need to effectively lead and manage an organization. We will take a decidedly experimental and applied approach to examine this topic. Our goal in this course is to learn how to translate theories into more specific competencies that will improve your ability to lead and manage groups and teams. We will feel successful if you walk away at the end of the session with some useful skills that you can apply throughout your organizational lives.

Increasing attention to the impact of business on society has made ethics more important to organizational success than at any time in recent history. With corporate governance processes driving ethics and the emergence of a new breed of "social entrepreneurs," executives need to understand the centrality of this dimension to business. This course explores how law and stakeholder interests impact corporate managing tradeoffs in ethical decision-making, and concepts for assessing social return on investment as a component of business performance.

Probability and statistical analysis; more advance random variables, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing, Bayesian analysis, time series, and statistical investigation. 

Organizations use their operations to achieve their strategic objectives. While operations can be diverse, they have characteristics in common. This course focuses on those common attributes. The class will focus on managing processes, inventory, supply chain management and the integration of operations with strategic issues.

The real-world principles, tactics, and strategies for managing information technology in for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises are explored from an executive perspective. 

Market and customer analysis for product service, price, promotion, and distribution decisions; study of marketing management theories and practices to maximize customer value and satisfaction.

This course provides a market-based view of innovation and entrepreneurial activities. The focus is on how to apply an effective process to identify new product and entrepreneurial opportunities and to develop an appropriate plan to bring the product to market. We will cover topics such as the emergence of innovative ideas, new product development within and beyond organizational boundaries, innovation in an entrepreneurial environment and marketing strategies for innovations.


Concentrations and Electives

Earn a resume-boosting concentration by taking grouped electives. Concentrations are available in:

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Finance
  • Healthcare Informatics
  • Healthcare Management
  • Management and Organizations
  • Privacy and Security
  • Marketing

To complete your units of electives, you’ll choose from options ranging from Health Economics to Integrative Leadership to Social Media Marketing. View all our online MBA electives:

Entrepreneurship (complete 3)

In our rapidly changing global environment, companies cannot be static; they must continually adjust, adapt, and redefine themselves to remain competitive. Innovative and entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors are necessary for firms of all sizes to prosper and flourish. The challenges include creating an environment for new ideas within companies and encouraging employees to act on these ideas. This course examines Corporate Entrepreneurship as a broad concept that includes the generation, development, and implementation of new ideas, behaviors, products, services, systems, plans, and programs within established organizations. Graduate-level requirements include a research paper and higher overall scrutiny of work.

This class is designed to strengthen your customer management skills and further your understanding of a set of powerful ideas about how to manage customers for superior business performance. You will be exposed to a set of well-established and effective strategies to create, deliver, and sustain customer value, as well as some of the most formal frameworks and fresh ideas about how to acquire and retain customers. 

Value maximization; simulation of value distribution; sources of venture capital; timing of initial public offering; new venture ownership structuring.

In this course, you will focus your business and entrepreneurial skills on contemporary healthcare challenges and opportunities.  Through a series of readings, case studies, discussions, guest speakers, and assignments, you will explore several contemporary healthcare problems and identify entrepreneurial solutions to these problems. Graduate-level requirements include completion of one additional assignment. Each graduate student will help facilitate one of the classes by gathering additional readings, preparing a brief presentation, preparing a set of discussion questions, or developing an in-class activity.

In this course, you will focus your business and entrepreneurial skills on contemporary technology challenges and opportunities in the form of ventures.
 

This course will focus on what is increasingly understood to be a primary reason for the gap between aspirations and outcomes for innovation and entrepreneurship: the leadership and organization of the innovative process. Through readings, cases, exercises, and projects, we will explore these and related questions on the intangible contributors to innovative success for both existing and new firms in manufacturing, services, and nonprofits.

The Business for Entrepreneurs course will focus on topics of fundamental macroeconomics, accounting, management, and marketing.

This course is organized as an introduction to entrepreneurial principles for those seeking to develop an owner-operated, lifestyle business. The primary audience for this course is those interested in starting a business in the traditional small-business business model with the aim to achieve high growth. Participants will learn how to start, expand, and grow their business with an emphasis on learning practical skills including effective leadership, negotiation, and managing conflict with confidence. Effective recruitment practices and how to make your business indispensable to your customers are among the key real-world skills taught. At the end of the course, student groups will compete to sell a similar assigned product in the marketplace and reflect on their experience.

This course examines socially centered entrepreneurship under a global umbrella. Our global interdependence teaches us to look for opportunities anywhere. We realize more than ever that no person, team, company, or country is an island. Our personal lives and the lives of the local organizations around us depend on issues at the international level, and the trend will likely continue.

Focusing your business and entrepreneurial skills on social and/or environmental problem-solving.  Graduate-level requirements include the experience to pitch the social entrepreneurship venture they have developed.  Also, the graduate students will have the experience to facilitate classes.

Finance (complete 3)

The purpose of this course is to build skills related to understanding accounting disclosures and using the information contained in financial statements. Course topics include profitability measurement, credit analysis, footnote analysis, forecasting and valuation. Cases and examples are used extensively to enhance understanding of key issues and concepts. 

Financial theory applied to capital structure; investment decisions; corporate valuation; and corporate financial policies.

Fundamental Valuation Modeling is a course designed to introduce students to fundamental theories and methods underlying the practice of financial valuation. The course will require students to apply concepts, principles, and analytical methods from FIN 510E in a comprehensive manner. Significant time outside of the classroom will be required for the project. This work is to provide students with experiences like those faced in the workplace where information is often imperfect, and data is often vague or ambiguous. The goal of the course is to provide students with a framework that will enhance their ability to analyze complex financial issues faced by real-world managers and to become proficient in solving such challenges via spreadsheet modeling. FIN 510A and FIN 510B must be completed with a grade of B or higher to enroll in this course.

International finance markets and the financial management of the multinational firm.

The purpose of this course is to develop an understanding of current practices in investment management. The focus of the course will be on the selection of appropriate assets to meet specific investment goals and objectives. Course topics will will include an overview of securities and their markets, analysis of investor needs and the assessment of portfolio performance. Hands-on exercises and cases will be used to reinforce the understanding of course topics. FIN 510A and FIN 510B must be completed with a grade of B or higher to enroll in this course.

Portfolio theory with applications to the markets for equities, fixed-income securities, and options. Risk analysis and investment strategies.

This course will explore how psychological biases influence our traditional decision-making process along with insights into alternative theories, anomalies, and their influence on asset pricing.

Financial markets and institutions; effects of economic conditions, government policy and Federal Reserve Board announcements on financial institutions, the flow of funds, and interest rates; term structure of interest rates; financial institution management.

This course is an introduction to the primary alternative investment strategies that are available to sophisticated investors including pension plans, insurance companies, foundations, wealth advisors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals. Major topics include hedge funds, private equity, commodities, real property, structured products and impact investments. Emphasis is placed on understanding the attributes of each alternative asset class from an investor’s perspective, and how they can contribute to improving a portfolio’s overall risk and return characteristics. While quantitative topics related to alternative investments will be explored, this survey course focuses on qualitative characteristics.

Weekly lectures on major alternative investment topics and a series of related case studies form the foundation for the course.  Additionally, several leading industry practitioners will be interviewed, including alternative portfolio managers, family office executives, and chief investment officers, who will discuss current topical issues in alternative assets and institutional portfolio management. A hands-on trading simulation enables students to experience a macro hedge fund environment where long and short strategies are implemented using equity, interest rate, commodity and currency futures contracts. FIN 510A and FIN 510B must be completed with a grade of B or higher to enroll in this course for Spring Session 2. FIN 521 is a pre-requisite after Spring 2, 2024

The focus of this course is on understanding the real estate valuation process and how to perform due diligence on real estate acquisitions.

The focus of this course is on evaluating, financing, and managing investments in real property.

Marketing (complete 3)

Application of communications theory and research findings in advertising, sales promotion, publicity, personal selling; planning, conduct, and administration of programs of information and persuasion.

This course is designed to introduce students to the complexities of social media marketing through revealing foundational theories and associated concepts of collective behavior, social influence, and social media marketing. This is essentially a marketing strategy course. The primary focus of this course will be on understanding: consumers¿ social interactions, the impact technology has on marketplace relationships, the various social media channels available to marketers, how to build social media marketing strategies, and how to track their effectiveness. Our levels of analysis will shift from individuals to collectives. You will be responsible for conducting primary and secondary research, recognizing course theories in action, creating effective social media marketing campaigns, and managing social media marketing efforts.

This is a course in marketing strategy. The key objective will be the development of a long-term marketing strategy for a company or business organization by focusing on its customers, competitors and market opportunities. The course provides an opportunity to broaden your understanding of strategic marketing and to develop skills and gain experience in formulating, implementing and monitoring marketing strategy.

Great products/services supported by attractive advertising and distribution create value for the customer while effective pricing captures value for the company.  Although pricing cannot fully compensate for poor product development, promotion and distribution, ineffective pricing can surely prevent those efforts from resulting in financial success.  Many companies create great value for their customers yet fail to capture that value in their earnings due to a lack of integration between their value creation activities and their pricing decisions.  Experts say that for marketing strategists, pricing is the moment of truth.  The purpose of this course is to make sure that when you reach that moment of truth you know 'what' to do and 'how' to do it. To equip you with the required expertise, this course covers theories, conceptual frameworks, and analytical tools used to make effective pricing decisions.

This course is designed to provide an overview of applied research methods as used in marketing research and as tools to help make effective marketing decisions. The course is for managers who will be using marketing data rather than those doing "marketing research."

Management (complete 3)

Law permeates virtually all aspects of business, and a basic understanding of business law is critical for managers. In that regard, this course introduces students to the fundamentals of contract law, corporate law, securities regulation, employment law, mergers and acquisitions law and property law. We will cover the principal legal rules and issues in these areas and discuss how they impact business operations and transactions.

Examines the design, management, and leadership of task-performing teams in formal organizational settings

This course is designed to provide the student with a much deeper understanding of the topic. This course is both skills and knowledge-based.  The student will be exposed to cutting-edge issues in the research of negotiations.

Privacy & Security (complete 3)

Broad survey of the individual, organizational, cultural, social and ethical issues provoked by current and projected uses of networked computers on the internet. *Mandatory

This course exposes the student to a broad range of computer systems and information security topics.  It is designed to provide a general knowledge of measures to ensure confidentiality, availability, and integrity of information systems.  Topics range from hardware, software, and network security to INFOSEC, OPSEC, and NSTISS overviews. Components include national policy, threats, countermeasures, and risk management among others.  Graduate-level requirements include an oral case study report as their final.

The objective of this course is to provide students with a thorough understanding of risk management as it applies to information security and corporate assets.  The course covers numerous concepts including asset valuation, data collection, conducting a risk assessment, risk reporting, and monitoring as well as presenting various risk assessment models and frameworks.   Students will complete this course with an understanding of the elements and steps necessary for completing a risk assessment.

Healthcare Informatics (complete 3)

This course introduces students to the concepts and practices of healthcare information systems. Topics include (1) introduction to the health IT discipline; (2) major applications and commercial vendors; (3) decision support methods and technologies; (4) information systems design and engineering; and (5) new opportunities and emerging trends. A semester-long group project will provide students with hands-on experience in planning and building healthcare information systems; associated ethical and legal concerns, software engineering and human-computer interaction issues, and user acceptance and outcomes evaluation methods will also be discussed. Graduate-level requirements include leading a class discussion on a course-related topic.

Visualizing data is an important step in understanding data, exploring relationships, and "making a case." The goal of this class is to introduce students to principles and tools of data visualizations and create visualizations using appropriate tools for two different but related purposes: (1) exploration; and (2) presentation. The first part is about trying to understand the data and test hypotheses that drive the data visualization effort and formulate a story; the second part is to convey that finding to others in a convincing manner.

The overarching goal is to equip participants to contribute to and/or conduct data analytics projects effectively. In this course, we will explore the variety of clinical data collected during the delivery of healthcare. You will learn to construct analysis-ready datasets and apply computational procedures to answer clinical questions. This course will further introduce the fundamental concepts and principles of machine learning as it applies to medicine and healthcare. We will explore machine learning approaches, medical use cases, and metrics unique to healthcare, as well as best practices for designing, building and evaluating machine learning applications in healthcare.

 

 

Healthcare Management (complete 3)

This course covers financial and managerial accounting topics relevant to the healthcare industry. Concepts covered include the financial and operational implications of changes in healthcare reimbursement; understanding and analyzing external financial statements for taxable and tax-exempt healthcare entities; usefulness of capital and operating budgets; practical applications of managerial accounting; and decision making tools for managers within healthcare enterprises.

 

Healthcare expenditures now account for more than 1/6 of Gross Domestic Product in the United States. This class will explore the sources of funding for those expenditures and the rapidly changing trends therein.

This course will explore the principles of High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) and apply them to healthcare organizations.  We will begin with investigating the need for a paradigm shift in healthcare culture that addresses healthcare reform, value-based purchasing, healthcare regulation, and the increased complexity in healthcare that makes it nearly impossible to eradicate all healthcare errors.  The course will then explore High-Reliability Organization Theory and the driving principles behind it.

Once this groundwork has been laid, the course will explore the term reliability and how to measure it.  Leadership, Management, and Culture will be examined in the context of creating High-Reliability Organizations as well as design and rollout.  Finally, this course will explore graphical and statistical methods utilized by High-Reliability Organizations and their financial impact.

To achieve the learning objectives for this course lectures, guest speakers, a textbook, additional related articles, and websites will be utilized as well as case studies.

Healthcare organizations need to adapt to the rapid changes occurring in payment models, delivery mechanisms, technological advances, disruptive innovations, and industry reorganization. This course covers theory and technique for leading organizations through transformation at the broad strategic level and in terms of improving operations, all within the unique context and challenges of the health care industry.

There are literally hundreds of different theories and models of leadership. Rather than studying these different theories and models, we will examine leadership from a practical perspective.  Across these theories, there is a common set of effective leadership practices.  These practices do not encompass everything a leader needs to do to be effective.  Nor do these practices address all the nuances of leading different types of people in different healthcare settings.  Nonetheless, they represent a foundation for exemplary leadership and if you can master these practices, you will be more effective at leading healthcare teams, departments, and organizations.

Leadership in practice is endlessly fascinating. Reading about theories of leadership can be as entertaining as watching paint dry. Therefore, the challenge in this class is learning about leadership in a way that is engaging and insightful.  We will use several interviews with healthcare leaders to help understand the subtleties of leadership action.  We will also use several exercises, cases, and reflections to have you experience different elements of effective leadership. The exam, term paper, and other writing assignments will ask you to analyze and reflect, rather than simply memorize, and recite.

 

This course focuses on the management and organization of health care delivery, particularly in the United States. The course examines the salient features of the health care context, the unique challenges these features produce for managers in the industry, and solutions that organizations have used to address those challenges. The micro to macro challenges and solutions are explored, with a particular emphasis on the ways that leadership, human resources, culture, operations, organization design, and strategy influence the quality, safety, and costs of care and the patient experience.

In this course, you will focus your business and entrepreneurial skills on contemporary healthcare challenges and opportunities.  Through a series of readings, case studies, discussions, guest speakers, and assignments, you will explore several contemporary healthcare problems and identify entrepreneurial solutions to these problems. Graduate-level requirements include completion of one additional assignment. Each graduate student will help facilitate one of the classes by gathering additional readings, preparing a brief presentation, preparing a set of discussion questions, or developing an in-class activity.

This course introduces students to the concepts and practices of healthcare information systems. Topics include (1) introduction to the health IT discipline; (2) major applications and commercial vendors; (3) decision support methods and technologies; (4) information systems design and engineering; and (5) new opportunities and emerging trends. A semester-long group project will provide students with hands-on experience in planning and building healthcare information systems; associated ethical and legal concerns, software engineering and human-computer interaction issues, and user acceptance and outcomes evaluation methods will also be discussed. Graduate-level requirements include leading a class discussion on a course-related topic.

The development and exchange of scholarly information, usually in a small group setting. The scope of work shall consist of research by course registrants, with the exchange of the results of such research through discussion, reports, and/or papers. Course may include special topics in MIS such as advanced research methodologies, strategic business modeling and simulation, and other potential new topics.

In this course, we will take a "customer-centric" view and explore how participants in the healthcare sector (physicians & nurses, hospital administrators, executives in the pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors, as well as various intermediaries who service the sector) can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their offerings (both products and services) to help with the needs of their customers- the consumers of health care, i.e. the patients and their families. We will explore a framework through with this marketing philosophy can be implemented in the healthcare sector using tools that help the healthcare providers learn about customer needs, design appropriate products and services and assess their value to these customers, price them, communicate the benefits, and make them accessible. This will be accomplished utilizing readings, lectures, cases, and discussions to develop a conceptual grasp of the issues involved. The concepts and skills learned in the class should be equally relevant to participants in each sub-sector of the healthcare economy. The goal again is to provide a foundation that would enable you to be effective in leading your own workplace to design strategies based on such a customer-oriented (marketing) approach.

Additional Electives

This course will focus exclusively on key economic and competitive factors impacting national and industrial sector performance in an increasingly global and volatile marketplace. We will consider concepts and discuss examples that will assist students in grasping the complexities and dynamism of the global business environment. These concepts will include, but will not be limited to, the impact of foreign exchange markets on global transactions, the critical role played by international trade, effective management in the volatile environments of emerging markets, and managing across geographical, cultural, and ethical distance.

Career Management is designed to provide MBA students with the knowledge, resources, and tools needed to navigate and manage their MBA-level career search. This course applies career management theories, methods, and best practices to empower students to successfully manage their careers now and in the future. The focus will be given to resume and cover letter writing, personal branding, networking, interview skills, and job search techniques.

This course introduces participants to advanced topics in management and organizational leadership as well as current, relevant research from a range of disciplines and domains. Faculty and guest experts will share information, answer questions, and moderate class discussions. Units will vary by the contact hours per program.

This integrative cross-disciplinary experiential class takes on real-world health care problems and works to identify and recommend solutions. As healthcare costs continue to rise, leaders of healthcare organizations are looking to make better use of the resources they currently have. The ability to identify and define problems, think analytically, and develop and recommend solutions can help students gain the skills needed to be valuable members of any organization. In this course, we will focus on using critical thinking, communication skills, presentation skills, change management, financial skills, innovative thinking, organizational design, and project management skills to complete the consulting project. MGMT 528 is two sessions; 2 units per session.

Corporations today are said to be data-rich but information poor. For example, retailers can easily process and capture millions of transactions every day. In addition, the widespread proliferation of economic activity on the Internet leaves behind a rich trail of micro-level data on consumers, their purchases, retailers and their offerings, auction bidding, music sharing, and so on and so forth. Data mining techniques can help companies discover knowledge and acquire business intelligence from these massive datasets.   This course will cover data mining for business intelligence. Data mining refers to extracting or "mining" knowledge from large amounts of data. It consists of several techniques that aim at discovering rich and interesting patterns that can bring value or "business intelligence" to organizations. Examples of such patterns include fraud detection, consumer behavior, and credit approval. The course will cover the most important data mining techniques --- classification, clustering, association rule mining, visualization, prediction --- through a hands-on approach using XL Miner and other specialized software, such as the open-source WEKA software.

Visualizing data is an important step in understanding data, exploring relationships, and "making a case." The goal of this class is to introduce students to principles and tools of data visualizations and create visualizations using appropriate tools for two different but related purposes: (1) exploration; and (2) presentation. The first part is about trying to understand the data and test hypotheses that drive the data visualization effort and formulate a story; the second part is to convey that finding to others in a convincing manner.

Project Management is the application of knowledge, analytical skills, scheduling software tools, and techniques related to various project activities to meet project requirements. This course specifically addresses the nine-project management "knowledge areas", the five-project management "process groups" and the 4-way constraints of project management (i.e., scope, time, cost, quality). Graduate-level requirements include an additional term paper or a team-based PM Project with a real organization.  Graduate-level requirements include an additional term paper or a team-based PM Project with a real organization.


Optional Global Experience

Today’s globalized business world drives everything we do, so we give MBA students the chance to experience our curriculum hands-on in business environments from Brazil to Chile to Singapore. Online MBA students have the option of participating in the MBA global business experience with our Full-time or Evening MBA students.

  

Your Future is Calling

You’ve heard the “why.” If you think you’re a good fit, it’s time for the “how.” Let’s get you on the road to your Eller Online MBA. Contact us or begin your application now:

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