What is systems thinking and practice? The essence of systems thinking and practice is in 'seeing' the world in a particular way, because how you 'see' things affects the way you approach situations or undertake specific tasks. This free course will help you to learn about the problems of defining a system and meet some of the key concepts used ...

Turn your business ideas into reality with this free course on entrepreneurship. Explore practical steps for starting and growing a business, from developing ideas and choosing a business model to funding, location, and assessing your own skills and risk approach — all illustrated with real-life case studies.

This free course introduces basic ideas of probability. It focuses on dealing with uncertainty in a financial context and explores decision trees, a powerful decision-making technique, which can help you to simplify and formulate business decisions. The course also includes videos that introduce the key ideas and guide you through numerous ...

This free course, Understanding your customers, is a short introduction to understanding customers. The course underlines the relevance of understanding customers as individuals, members of society and members of organisations. It clarifies some key marketing concepts and terminology and highlights some differences between consumer and ...

Operations management is one of the central functions of all organisations. This free course, Understanding operations management, will provide you with a basic framework for understanding this function, whether producing goods or services or in the private, public or voluntary sectors. In addition, this OpenLearn course discusses the role of ...

Many projects are now ‘virtual’, i.e. some or all of the team are located remotely and may be working in different time zones. The project manager needs all the traditional soft skills, and more. This free course, Managing virtual project teams, looks at knowledge and techniques which underpin team selection and then consider the additional ...