A DIY MBA Education
At SkipMBA, we believe that no one should have to pay exorbitant amounts of money for a world-class business education. And why should you? Information has never been as abundant and readily accessible as it is today. So we have gone ahead and leveraged this disposition of free information. Below is a list of free courses that would reflect the perfect DIY MBA Education: Entrepreneurship & Business, Product Development & Design, Marketing, Finance & Accounting, Decision Making.
Entrepreneurship & Business
How to Build A Startup - by Steve Blank
In an introduction to the basics of the famous Customer Development Process, Steve Blank provides insight into the key steps needed to build a successful startup. The main idea in this course is learning how to rapidly develop and test ideas by gathering massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback. This is the perfect start to your DIY MBA if you're getting into entrepreneurship!
Entrepreneurship Through the Lens of Venture Capital - by Stanford University
The course explores how successful startups navigate funding,managing, and scaling their new enterprise. This process is explored through guest lectures and mentorship from experienced venture capital investors and seasoned entrepreneurs who manage these issues on a daily basis in Silicon Valley.
Moving Your Product To Market - by Oxford University
The course explores how successful startups navigate funding,managing, and scaling their new enterprise. This process is explored through guest lectures and mentorship from experienced venture capital investors and seasoned entrepreneurs who manage these issues on a daily basis in Silicon Valley.
How to Finance and Grow Your Startup – Without VC - by University of London
This course will introduce, and help you put to use in your startup, the five models through which your customers can – and will, if you ask them! – fund your business. These five time-tested models have been put to use by entrepreneurial superstars like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and more.
Crucial learning for any aspiring or current entrepreneur! A regular MBA won't lend you the time or resources for this, but a DIY MBA most certainly will!
Product Development & Design
Product Design - by Google
This course is designed to help you materialize your game-changing idea and transform it into a product that you can build a business around. Product Design blends theory and practice to teach you product validation, UI/UX practices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for setting and tracking actionable metrics.
Ever wished that they taught creativity at business schools? Business doesn't have to be drab -- in fact, it shouldn't be! In this DIY MBA program we ensure that product design is part of your repertoire as an entrepreneur!
Principles of Design - by Don Norman
This course is designed to help you materialize your game-changing idea and transform it into a product that you can build a business around. Product Design blends theory and practice to teach you product validation, UI/UX practices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for setting and tracking actionable metrics.
Don Norman is an absolute genius! An fun to learn with. This DIY MBA Design list would be incomplete without his works!
Iterative Innovation Process - by MIT
Throughout the course, we build up the innovation process model step by step with real examples and exercises. The goal of this course is to change and refine the way you view the innovation process, providing you with the foundation on which to build your future innovation
Design Thinking for Innovation - by University of Virginia
In this course, we provide an overview of design thinking and work with a model containing four key questions and several tools to help you understand design thinking as a problem solving approach. We also look at several stories from different organizations that used design thinking to uncover compelling solutions.
Marketing
An Introduction To Marketing - by Wharton & Pennsylvania
Taught by three of Wharton's top faculty in the marketing department, consistently ranked as the #1 marketing department in the world, this course covers three core topics in customer loyalty: branding, customer centricity, and practical, go-to-market strategies.
Branding, Content, and Social Media - by Ohio State University
This course will help you figure out that last part – earning attention with something you publish for a strategic reason to a particular audience in the online universe. This course will be especially helpful for those currently or potentially working in small to medium-sized PR shops. You will learn to focus your energies where branding, social media, and compelling content intersect.
Marketing Analytics - by University of Virginia
This course gives you the tools to measure brand and customer assets, understand regression analysis, and design experiments as a way to evaluate and optimize marketing campaigns. You'll leave the course with a solid understanding of how to use marketing analytics to predict outcomes and systematically allocate resources.
An often overlooked topic: Analytics. At SkipMBA we value focussing on the right metrics. But knowing what the "right" metrics are can be a challenge. Hence we recommend this course for you DIY MBA.
Personal Branding - by University of Virginia
Learners will: Understand both what personal branding means and what it means to inhabit their brand, Establish themselves on at least three social media platforms, Create a mission statement for their personal brand o Build a board of directors for their brand, Become familiar with the basics of digital security and reputation management, Create a system for on-going brand maintenance
Finance & Accounting
Financial Markets - by Yale University
The course strives to offer understanding of the theory of finance and its relation to the history, strengths and imperfections of such institutions as banking, insurance, securities, futures, and other derivatives markets, and the future of these institutions over the next century.
Valuation - by New York University
Valuation is a key tool in almost every aspect of finance - corporate finance, investing and portfolio management. This is an entirely online version of my MBA valuation class that is designed for someone who wants to understand the valuation process and its inputs, but does not have the time nor the inclination to sit through 80-minutes sessions.
Accounting in 60 Minutes - by Vincent Turner
This course will show you the very basics of accounting. You can complete it in about an hour. The course includes videos of the instructor at the whiteboard. You will complete simple quizzes to reinforce what you have learned. This course is intended for business owners, business students, managers or anyone who wants to understand basic accounting.
Accounting Analytics - by University of Pennsylvania
In this course, you’ll learn how data is used to assess what drives financial performance and to forecast future financial scenarios. While many accounting and financial organizations deliver data, accounting analytics deploys that data to deliver insight, and this course will explore the many areas in which accounting data provides insight into other business areas including consumer behavior predictions, corporate strategy, risk management, optimization, and more.
Decision Making
The Science of Decisions (Statistics) - by SJS University
Statistics are simply objective and systematic methods for describing and interpreting information so that you may make the most informed decisions about life:
- The applications of statistics to everyday life
- Methods for acquiring data through observation and experimentation
- To organize and describe quantitative and categorical forms of data
- Anticipating patterns using basic probability and sampling
- Statistical inference through estimation and hypothesis testing
- Correlation and simple regression
- Ways of describing the strength of relationships between variables
No business education is complete without statistics. Statistics lays the foundation for analytics and decision making. To make the best decisions, you need to understand how the data can mislead you. The perfect addition to the DIY MBA.
Business Intelligence Tools - By East Tennessee State University
n this course we will work with Tableau, SAP Business Objects Analysis, SAP Business Warehouse (BW), SAP Business Objects Explorer, SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, SAP Crystal Reports, SAP Dashboards, SAP Predictive Analysis, and most significantly SAP HANA.
Game Theory - by Stanford & UBC
The course will provide the basics: representing games and strategies, the extensive form (which computer scientists call game trees), Bayesian games (modeling things like auctions), repeated and stochastic games, and more. We'll include a variety of examples including classic games and a few applications.