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The Data Analytics/MBA core curriculum requires students to complete 42 credit hours of graduate education coursework. Students must then select six additional hours of electives: four Data Analytics elective credits and two for MBA. In total, the dual-degree consists of 48 credit hours.
Core Courses
- Compass Learning Community, MG 6110 (1 credit hour)
- Managerial Communications, MG 6008 (2 credit hours)
- Competitive Analysis, EC 6300 (2 credit hours)
- Financial Analysis, AC 6110 (2 credit hours)*
- Global Markets, MG 6120 (2 credit hours)
- Financial Strategy and Decision Making, FN 6310 (2 credit hours)
- Leadership and Organizational Behavior, MG 6310 (2 credit hours)
- Project Management, MG 6320 (2 credit hours)
- Marketing Strategy, MK 6410 (2 credit hours)
- Corporate Social Responsibility, MG 6130 (2 credit hours)
- Professional Development: Contemplation in Action, MG 6410 (2 credit hours)
- MBA Capstone, MG 6490 (3 credit hours)
- Business Intelligence, BIA 6300 (2 credit hours)
- Applied Data Mining, BIA 6301 (2 credit hours)
- Data Visualization, BIA 6302 (2 credit hours)
- Predictive Models, BIA 6303 (2 credit hours)
- Text Mining, BIA 6304 (2 credit hours)
- Big Data, BIA 6305 (2 credit hours)
- Web and Social Media Analytics, BIA 6306 (2 credit hours)
- Dashboards, BIA 6307 (2 credit hours)
- Analytics and Strategy, BIA 6308 (2 credit hours)
*Students with an undergraduate degree in accounting are not required to take Financial Analysis, AC 6110, but must take Corporate Law for Managers, MG 6330, in lieu of AC 6110 to meet CPA exam requirements.
Course Descriptions
MG 6110. Compass Learning Community (1 credit hour)
This course provides an orientation to Rockhurst, the Helzberg School of Management and the MBA program. It discusses the distinct traditions, values and principles of Jesuit education in light of their connection to the MBA program. Students receive an introduction to adult-learning theory, personal development, business ethics and the team concept. Students complete a number of assessment instruments and begin assignments that they continue to develop and re-engage in subsequent courses.
Students must take this course during their first semester of the program.
MG 6008. Managerial Communications (2 credit hours)
This course explores the various techniques, instruments, processes and styles that leaders employ to communicate effectively within organizations. Students write, give oral presentations and learn how to use electronic media effectively. Exercises employ numerous real or simulated business situations that require communication in different styles, using a variety of forms and methods. This course provides an introductory experience and orientation to the MBA program. It establishes common communication protocols, determines critical self-awareness profiles and identifies the Rockhurst themes that students apply throughout the program.
EC 6300. Competitive Analysis (2 credit hours)
In this course students apply economic concepts and ideas to firm and industry performance. The course draws upon a number of analytical tools such as strategic mapping, survival analysis, game theory and transaction cost economics to examine how and why firms and markets perform and evolve. It examines a number of issues including the make vs. buy decision process, cooperation vs. competition, changing vertical and horizontal boundaries and internal vs. external analysis. Ultimately, students obtain skills to identify, analyze and capitalize on competitive advantage.
Prerequisites: Undergraduate courses in (minimum one each of) microeconomics, macroeconomics and statistics.
AC 6110. Financial Analysis (2 credit hours)*
This is a practical, activity-based course involving the definition, creation, interpretation and evaluation of financial statements including the effects of key financial decisions, construction of financial metrics, application of basic valuation tools and determination of relevant costs for decision-making.
MG 6330. Corporate Law for Managers (2 credit hours)*
This course focuses on law as it affects the corporation and other business enterprises. The topics include the formation of various business enterprises, the rules of agency, shareholder rights and liabilities, securities regulations, bankruptcy, and an overview of government regulation. Where appropriate, the course explores connections between ethics and law.
MG 6120. Global Markets (2 credit hours)
This course focuses on two broad themes: the globalization of production and the globalization of markets. Students develop an understanding of the key cultural, legal, political, financial and economic forces that shape how firms enter new markets and how firms manage their increasingly complex supply chains. Students focus on issues in cross-cultural management and strategic entry into foreign markets.
Prerequisites: Undergraduate course in microeconomics macroeconomics or EC 4550/EC 6002.
FN 6310. Financial Strategy and Decision-Making (2 credit hours)
This is an applied course involving the use of accounting information, financial metrics and strategies, and valuation principles to describe and analyze business problems and facilitate managerial decision-making. Upon completion, students effectively communicate financial results as well as identify ethical issues in financial decision-making and reporting.
Prerequisite: ACFN 6110 Financial Analysis or Bachelors in Accounting.
MG 6310. Leadership and Organizational Behavior (2 credit hours)
This course increases student awareness of organizational processes and practices including leadership, management, motivation, morale, group dynamics, interpersonal communications, conflict and group problem-solving. The course provides conceptual insights and behavioral skills needed for successful leadership of continuous improvement in individual, team and organizational performance.
MG 6320. Project Management (2 credit hours)
This course introduces students to the process of project management including planning, implementation, progress measurement and performance, results and evaluation. Students learn the knowledge, skills and technical tools for identifying project requirements, establishing project objectives and scheduling, balancing constraints and resources, and considering the needs and expectations of key stakeholders. Students learn the trade-offs and balance of project scope, resources and schedule, and how to compose an effective project management team. The course also covers producing project documentation, such as scope, requirements, design and testing documentation.
MK 6410. Marketing Strategy (2 credit hours)
This strategic marketing course gives students practice in the design, implementation and control of marketing strategies. It is an operationally oriented course in which the application and not the definition of marketing concepts, principles and methods are important. The course stresses integration of the major decision areas of marketing rather than the sequential discussion of these subjects.
Prerequisites: MG 6008, AC 6110, MG 6120, and EC 6300.
MG 6130. Corporate Social Responsibility (2 credit hours)
This course builds foundational understanding of corporate social responsibility as the formation and stewardship of policies and processes leading to a culture of good decision-making in a company and in society at-large. Stakeholder analysis plays an important role in this course not only in examination of internal business decisions and processes, but also externally in understanding, anticipating and incorporating impacts and responses from social, governmental and environmental factors into decision-making.
MG 6410. Professional Development: Contemplation in Action (2 credit hours)
This course demonstrates and documents the broad variety of academic, experiential and application-based learning experiences the student amasses throughout the MBA program. It assesses the growth each student attains on the journey and points them toward the future as they graduate. At the beginning of the MBA program, students are assigned a passport of activities to complete prior to the culminating activities of this course. These passport activities may include content-based workshops, assessment instrumentation to prepare students for personal and professional success in the modern workplace, one-on-one leadership coaching or mentoring and career management. Students develop this portfolio throughout each semester of the MBA program, and finalize it for evaluation as a professional development presentation portfolio during this final course.
MG 6410 is normally taken concurrently with (or directly after) MBA Capstone MG 6490.
MG 6490. MBA Capstone (3 credit hours)
In this capstone experience, students integrate and apply knowledge gained from mentoring, self-assessment and functional courses in their MBA program. Key processes include integrative case studies, classroom practitioner interactions, consultative team projects and the leadership credo event, all of which focus on the dynamics of organizational change and strategy implementation. Summative learning assessment is accomplished through completion of integrative writing assignments and assessment of team projects by a panel of faculty and business practitioners.
Students should take this course during their last semester of the program.
BIA 6300. Business Intelligence (2 credit hours)
Business intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information to enable more effective strategic, tactical and operational insights and decision-making with an emphasis on knowledge management. Using the case study approach in combination with contemporary software tools, students apply the concepts of business process analysis, quality control and improvement, performance monitoring through performance dashboards and balanced scorecards and process simulation.
BIA 6301. Applied Data Mining (2 credit hours)
This course provides a comprehensive overview of data mining techniques used to realize unseen patterns, including traditional statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. Students analyze large datasets and develop modeling solutions to support decision making in various domains such as healthcare, finance, security, marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). Students employ various models including decision trees, clustering, principal component analysis, classification, k-means, ensemble methods and other supervised and unsupervised predictive models. Students also learn how to apply these models into production through business rules and SQL. Statistics and exposure to at least one programming language are required. The primary software tools for this class is R.
Prerequisites: BIA 6300, BIA 6309 and BIA 6311 or consent of program director.
BIA 6302. Data Visualization (2 credit hours)
This course is about the interactive exploration of data and how it is achieved using data visualization software. Upon completion, students are able to present complex quantitative and qualitative data visually. Students learn to explore a range of different data types and structures. They learn about various interactive techniques for manipulating and examining data and producing effective visualizations. Students are guided through an exploration of quantitative business data to discern meaningful patterns, trends, relationships and exceptions that reveal business performance, potential problems and opportunities. Statistics and exposure to at least one programming language are required. The primary software tool for this class will be Tableau.
Prerequisite: BIA 6300 consent of program director.
BIA 6303. Predictive Models (2 credit hours)
This course teaches advanced statistical techniques to discover information and build predictive models from large sets of data. Emphasis is placed on applications for marketing research and operations. Methods include expansion of linear models, neural nets, support vector machines, naïve bayes and Bayesian networks, collaborative filtering, propensity models, market basket analysis, longitudinal data analysis and product launch models. Statistics and exposure to at least one programming language are required.
Prerequisites: BIA 6301, BIA 6311, BIA 6312 or consent of program director.
BIA 6304. Text Mining (2 credit hours)
This course introduces the essential techniques of text mining, understood as the extension of data mining's standard predictive methods to unstructured text. Students also learn web scraping techniques and collection of unstructured data from social media sites like Twitter, as well as company web sites. Students are also introduced to sentiment analysis and natural language processing. Statistics and exposure to at least one programming language are required. The primary software tools for this class are Python and R with some incorporation of Tableau. Applied Data Mining is recommended prior to taking this course.
Prerequisites: BIA 6301, BIA 6311, BIA 6312 or consent of program director.
BIA 6305. Big Data and Prep (2 credit hours)
This course emphasizes the extraction, transformation and preparation of data from traditional relational databases as well as more complex storage systems (such as Hadoop) for analytical purposes. Students are introduced to wrangling, munging and scraping of both structured and unstructured data. Students are also introduced to parallel processes for big data such as map reduce and query languages like HIVE. Exposure to at least one programming language is required. The primary software tool for this class is Python in addition to a standard rational database (Oracle or Mysql) and a Hadoop system.
Prerequisites: BIA 6301, BIA 6311, BIA 6312 or consent of program director.
BIA 6306. Web and Social Media Analytics (2 credit hours)
The primary focus of the course is the application of descriptive and predictive techniques to web analytics and other social media platforms including user behavior modeling and e-metrics for business intelligence. Students work with Google analytics and other web-based analytical platforms to judge performance and ROI of a company’s web and social media programs. The primary software tools for this class are Google Analytics and similar web-based tools.
Prerequisites: BIA 6300, BIA 6301 and BIA 6302 or consent of program director.
BIA 6307. Dashboard Creation and Implementation (2 credit hours)
This course provides instruction for creating analyses and dashboards in business intelligence applications. Students begin by building basic analyses to include in dashboards with increasing complexity as the course progresses. Emphasis is placed on employing meaningful metrics and visualizations catered to various departmental audiences. Students create dashboards for use on both desktops and tablet devices. Students also identify KPIs and how they may be used across different levels of an organization. Finally, students are introduced to analytical strategy models such as the balanced scorecard.
Prerequisites: BIA 6300 and BIA 6302 or consent of program director.
BIA 6308. Strategy and Analytics (2 credit hours)
The focus of this class is the implementation of analytics as a competitive advantage across enterprise. In this course, students read case studies and hear from guest speakers about challenges and opportunities generated by the advent of “big data”. Students make group presentations and write critical response papers related to these cases. Students consider various traditional business frameworks (e.g., SWOT analysis) for evaluating strategic opportunities available to companies in the “big data” space.
Prerequisites: BIA 6300, BIA 6301 and BIA 6302 or consent of program director.