Best Free MOOCs in Business In March

Accounting Analytics

School: Wharton School

Platform: Coursera

Registration Link: REGISTER HERE

Start Date: March 6, 2017

Workload: Not Specified

Grades: Students can choose to explore course videos, discussions, and ungraded assignments for free, but they won’t be able to submit graded assignments, earn a certificate, or complete a specialization without paying a $95 fee.

Instructors: Brian Bushee and Chrispher Ittner

Credentials: An instructor in Wharton’s Executive Education program, Professor Bushee also teaches the Introductory Financial Accounting course in the MBA program and Wharton’s Seminar for Business Journalists. As a teacher, he has won Wharton’s Excellence in Teaching Award, along with the Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award for being the faculty member “who has exemplified outstanding teaching quality during the last year.” Before teaching, Bushee worked in the private sector for CoreStates Financial Corporation and Coopers and Lybrand LLP.

A long time member of the Wharton faculty, Ittner is the EY Professor of Accounting, where he teaches the Management Accounting MBA course, along with executive education and doctoral courses. A Ph.D. himself, Ittner’s research, which focuses on performance measurement and cost management, has appeared in the Harvard Business Review along with academic outlets like the Journal of Accounting and Economics, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Management Accounting Research. In his spare time, Ittner is an editor with several academic journals. He has earned several teaching awards during his tenure, including MBA Core Teaching Excellence Awards in 2009, 2010, and 2012.

Description: Think big data is just for marketing and operations? Think again. In reality, analytics offers accounting and finance with new ways of identifying patterns and key nuggets of information that aren’t readily apparent on the balance sheet. It also provides an alternative model for forecasting and integrating financial data with other metrics. In this course, students will apply big data frameworks to accounting to inform “consumer behavior predictions, [operations optimization], corporate strategy, [and] risk management.”

Review: “A very useful course for people who are interested in doing more with accounting data. I have completed the course and I found it very useful to my area of work. Course Materials are quite technical though but I am sure people with an Accounting or Finance background will not struggle to appreciate the content.” For additional reviews, click here.

Additional Note: This is the second part of Wharton’s “Business Analytics” specialization, which includes courses on customer, accounting, and people analytics. To learn more about these courses and register for them, click here.