Best Free MOOCs In Business In December

Finance for Non-Finance Professionals

School: Rice University

Platform:  Coursera

Registration Link: REGISTER HERE

Start Date: December 4, 2017 (5 Weeks Long)

Workload: Not Specified

Instructor: James Weston

Credentials: Weston is the Harmon Whittington Professor of Finance at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, where he teaches the core finance courses to first-year MBAs. The 2016 recipient of Jones’ Alumni Faculty Award, the top teaching honor at the school, Weston ‘s research interests include valuation, financial econometrics, and empirical asset pricing. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia and his most recent research has been nominated for the Best Paper Award from the Journal of Finance.

Graded: To earn a passing mark, students must complete all graded assignments.

Description: Sometimes, finance can seem like a forbidding foreign language, with confusing jargon and complex and arcane rules. Many professionals are afraid to admit how financially illiterate they really are, no matter how much it costs their career. In this course, students will cover the same concepts as a core MBA core course. The difference: It is geared to learners with little exposure to finance.

According to Weston, the course will cover “the basics of financial valuation, the time value of money, compounding returns, and discounting the future.  You will understand discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation and how it compares to other methods.  We also step inside the mind of a corporate financial manager and develop the basic tools of capital budgeting.  We will survey the how, when, and where to spend money, make tradeoffs about investment, growth, dividends, and how to ensure sound fiscal discipline.  Our journey then turns to a Wall Street or capital markets perspective of investments as we discuss the fundamental tradeoff between risk and return.  We then synthesize our discussion of risk with our valuation framework and incorporate it into series of direct applications to practice.”

Review: “Basic knowledge very well explained. Will give any manager the necessary elements to understand the financial terms and have some references.” For additional reviews, click here.