Online Business Studies 2025-2026

This short course is designed to enable the candidate to develop a broad knowledge and understanding of the skills and practices which will be needed to establish, develop and maintain a business as a self-employed person.

Delivered by the University’s experienced Staff Development team, the programme addresses leadership in three overlapping levels. At the core, foundational level, is personal leadership: understanding your own behaviours and actions, and what leadership means for you. Next is how you lead in relation to others; how you communicate, interact, direct and influence to build your team. The outer level is leadership in a wider context, taking an organisational view on how your role as a leader can support the achievement of your team through motivating and engaging them to succeed.

The course will apply theoretical and practical content to explore the key concepts of Marketing in Management to provide students with an understanding of, coordinating and controlling marketing activities. The aim is to provide you with an understanding of the role of marketing and relevant critical strategies in establishing, developing and maintaining customer value.

Innovation is at the forefront of much of the current economic and political debate to improve the competitiveness of economies and firms. This course will focus on the role of new product development in enabling firms to generate competitive advantage, and the types of problems faced by firms in their innovation management. In particular this course blends the perspectives of marketing, design and manufacturing into a single approach to product development. It provides students with an appreciation for the realities of industrial practice and introduces sets of product development methods that can be put into immediate practice on development projects.

The course is based around the "3 pillars of sustainability", stakeholder engagements and ethics, and includes social marketing communications. The course mainly covers the aspects of Societal Marketing, Collaborative Consumption and Circularity.

This course provides an opportunity to explore and develop an understanding of your own ladership behaviour. Through seminars, group activities and discussions we investigate how personality, past experience, current situations and culture shape the way each of us behave in a leadership role. Using this information as a starting point we then explore how different leadership theories and approaches can be used as a frameworks for developing a deeper understanding of leadership behaviour. You will also have an opportunity to assist you in the development of your own approach to leadership.

An essential input into marketing success for any organisation is a focus on customer and prescriber needs and wants as well as an understanding of customer journeys. Once understood, organisations can work on the development, delivery and communication of value propositions.

Within the context of an identified workplace marketing challenge or opportunity, this course guides learners to develop and implement practical marketing insight and/or a marketing solution.

Students travel to Asian cities (such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo) over approximately thirty days in the summer term. This intense program involves daily meetings and seminars with key real estate investment and development professionals. Students will complete a project report based on the contents of the tour.

This course examines the main aspects of fixed income analysis. We start with an overview of the main fixed income assets, including: government securities, corporate instruments and asset-backed securities. We then discuss the main types of risk encountered by fixed income investors. Special attention is given to interest rate risk, which is a fundamental concept in fixed income analysis. We derive the main measures of interest rate risk and learn how to interpret these measures. In addition, we investigate theoretical aspects of interest rates and study theories that aim to explain the shape of the term structure of interest rates and its dynamics over time. We also study credit risk, its relation to corporate bonds and methods used by rating agencies to evaluate that risk. Finally, we discuss selected aspects of bond portfolio management such as portfolio immunisation and we consider how interest rate derivatives can be used in this process.

The course teaches you the different regulations in the financial system. We first go into detail on the main current banking standards: the Basel standards. Within the standards, we will look at credit, market and operational risks measures. We shall see how they impact the commercial or risk policy of a bank, alongside its impact on the day-to-day work of front officers, such as the loan officer. We then consider the financial market to understand the main regulation: MIFID.

Organisations expect managers to navigate difficulties that arise during project planning and implementation. This fundamentally requires refining understanding of a challenge or opportunity scenario, ideating potential solutions, effectively making and communicating decisions, as well as understanding how decisions may impact various stakeholders.

Within the context of an identified workplace challenge or opportunity, this course guides learners to develop and implement a practical solution.